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OmniOutliner 4 and iPad (Updated 7/23/10) Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Quote:
Originally Posted by DerekM View Post
Incase you haven't been following our blog, we announced two weeks ago that we're planning to bring five apps to the iPad: OmniFocus, OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniGraphSketcher, and OmniOutliner. I'm sure this brings up the question of what happens with OmniOutliner 4 for some of you.

Well, at first we were planning to not changing any plans and starting on the iPad version after OO4 was out, but after our iPad announcement it was clear that there is a big desire for OmniOutliner on the iPad as soon as possible. So in response to that we've modify our plans a bit as detailed in this follow-up blog post.



So, both are still coming and OO4 will be release first, but not with all the features we had planned. The bonus is they're both coming sooner!
Folks, an iPad version is very very good news for OO. In the new mobile age any personal productivity tool that doesn't have a mobile version with built in sync ability is a dead end product. An iPad version of OO keeps it alive.

I don't like OF. The whole tool is counter-intuitive to me, while OO's simplicity equals ease of use. Personal productivity tools are worthless to me unless they follow the Apple philosophy of UI simplicity. What is easy to use gets used.

A question for the Omni wizards, given that all Apple's devices run essentially the same OS now, does an iPad version imply an iPhone version? (I ask hopefully...!)

I use OO extensively at home, but use other iPhone apps for mobile to-do/shopping lists. Frustrating.
 
I'm sorry guys, but I am completely fed up with this. Many of us have been using OO for years and hyping the product to all our friends. Now we are waiting MONTHS for OO 4 and the iPad version only hearing it will be here "soon." When we ask nicely, you ignore us. Once in a while you come here and say "soon" again...

We deserve better.

I understand the demands trying to get multiple products out on multiple platforms. I truly do. I also understand the problems with giving timeframes and having people disappointed when you don't meet them. We are NOT asking for exact times, or even close estimates. I think everyone here would be happy if you simply told us "Sometime in the next month or two" or "by the end of the year" or "sometime next year."

The truth is, when I started using OO years ago, it was the best product out by far. You had no real competition for a simple, elegant, easy to use, outlining tool that just worked. Now, you do have competition. What is keeping me, and I assume many of us, here is loyalty and a desire not to re-learn another tool.

Unfortunately, your silence and unwillingness to provide even the most basic time estimates speaks volumes about your commitment to this product. As others have pointed out, it is abundantly clear that you have put OO on the back burner for what I presume are more profitable products. That's fine. I understand. This is business, and you have to make a profit. Believe me, we want you to make a profit.

While many of us feel some kind of loyalty to OO, that loyalty only goes so far. Without changes, you will lose us. This isn't a threat. I realize that we, individually, or even as a group, are not very profitable for you. This is just a wakeup call. If we are important to your business, make some changes, or we're gone.

/rant off
 
Go read Ken's posts and comments on the Omni blog (http://blog.omnigroup.com and also via links posted in this thread by Brian and DerekM). You might have to read about products other than just OmniOutliner to figure out the whole picture of what is happening when, but it is clear to me that work continues apace on the projects you ask about here, and they have not been abandoned. Given the grief encountered from not getting OmniFocus for iPad submitted to the App Store for approval by the hoped-for June 30 date, however, I can't see why he would want to be much more specific than he already has been.

Loyalty is a misguided concept here, IMO. If you find a better tool that will recoup the costs of switching in a reasonable time frame and make you more productive or your work more enjoyable, you should switch! You can always switch back if OO4 makes that worthwhile.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
Go read Ken's posts and comments on the Omni blog (http://blog.omnigroup.com and also via links posted in this thread by Brian and DerekM). You might have to read about products other than just OmniOutliner to figure out the whole picture of what is happening when, but it is clear to me that work continues apace on the projects you ask about here, and they have not been abandoned. Given the grief encountered from not getting OmniFocus for iPad submitted to the App Store for approval by the hoped-for June 30 date, however, I can't see why he would want to be much more specific than he already has been.

Loyalty is a misguided concept here, IMO. If you find a better tool that will recoup the costs of switching in a reasonable time frame and make you more productive or your work more enjoyable, you should switch! You can always switch back if OO4 makes that worthwhile.
You're right, loyalty is misguided. I generally value smaller companies because I feel they are more responsive to their customers. Previously Omni has been good to me, so I was hesitant to leave. Plus, if the updates are coming "soon" I would rather not learn a new product.

The point is, this cloak of silence leads me to believe that my thoughts about the company were, as you said, misguided.
 
There's no cloak of silence at work here - we have a lot of projects on our plate, we're working on getting everything done quickly without sacrificing quality, and we don't yet know how long it'll take to get the work done.

I understand your frustration, and I really do sympathize. While having us post guesses might feel better in the short term, if those guesses turn out to be inaccurate, it causes even more frustration and distraction.

In the meantime, all we can do is thank everyone for their patience, apologize for it being necessary, and do the work that everyone keeps telling us they need us to be working on. :-)
 
Thank you for the response, Brian.

It seems clear that the only reasons for complete silence rather than some basic guess (i.e., sometime in the next YEAR) after all the waiting are (1) the projects are nowhere near completion or (2) have been abandoned or at least indefinitely delayed. After all, Omni has provided exact DATE estimates for other projects (although I acknowledge that backfired when the company did not meet the deadline). We are asking for an estimate that is MUCH less definite than you have given for other products.

I wish you would go ahead and tell us the truth, but at least we can make that assumption on our own and start looking elsewhere.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by blackacre View Post
Thank you for the response, Brian.

It seems clear that the only reasons for complete silence rather than some basic guess (i.e., sometime in the next YEAR) after all the waiting are (1) the projects are nowhere near completion or (2) have been abandoned or at least indefinitely delayed. After all, Omni has provided exact DATE estimates for other projects (although I acknowledge that backfired when the company did not meet the deadline). We are asking for an estimate that is MUCH less definite than you have given for other products.

I wish you would go ahead and tell us the truth, but at least we can make that assumption on our own and start looking elsewhere.
If you read the blog posts, you'll see that they have given you such estimates.

From iPad or Bust: 2 down, 3 to go!
Meanwhile, I'm sure many of you are wondering about the other three apps: OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan. We're currently working on OmniFocus and OmniOutliner in parallel. OmniFocus has a bit of a head start, thanks to the work we'd already done in bringing it to iPhone, so we anticipate its iPad app will be ready in June. OmniOutliner is a little further out, and our current projection is that it will ship this summer. Finally, after we've shipped those four apps, we'll round out the set with OmniPlan for iPad which we're currently anticipating will ship sometime this fall.
Okay, so there's the prediction for OmniOutliner for the iPad.

For OmniOutliner 4, from iPad or Bust!:
Similarly, the OmniOutliner team is also heavily into a major development cycle—one which affects not only the next major release of OmniOutliner, version 4, but also the upcoming major releases of both OmniFocus and OmniPlan—so that team is booked up for at least the next several months. But while it won't be on iPad on day one, OmniOutliner is where all of our projects start and we think it will be a great fit for iPad, so we plan to adapt it as soon as possible.
From iPad or Bust: two weeks later:
Now, I mentioned two weeks ago that we were generally prioritizing iPad work over some of our Mac projects, but that some Mac projects—specifically, OmniOutliner 4 and OmniPlan 2—would take precedence over their iPad counterparts. In response to that plan, I received a lot of feedback that folks would like to see OmniOutliner for iPad sooner rather than later.

So we started thinking about how we could get started on OmniOutliner for iPad sooner. We really don't want to delay OmniOutliner 4, so we instead started thinking about how we could finish OmniOutliner 4 more quickly. We realized that if we scaled back some of the esoteric features which we'd planned for the Pro edition of version 4—cloning and multiple schemas—we could shave three months off its development schedule and get started on OmniOutliner for iPad that much sooner. Now, both of those features are still pretty interesting to us, and we've already laid the groundwork for supporting these in the underlying outlining engine—but we think bringing OmniOutliner on iPad is more important overall, so that's what we're going to do.

So I'm pleased to say that both OmniOutliner 4 and OmniOutliner for iPad will be coming three months sooner!
 
I appreciate your enthusiasm but if you read those post, you can't come up with a 6 moon range of dates. What you get is more of nothing.

The months sooner than what? See my point?

It was also a big hit to a lot of us when key features were announced to be left out for the dot-oh version that should be present. In all fairness it has been five years and you can see the frustration continue to increase. I am already evaluating other solutions to OO. It's sad but it had to happen at some point.




Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
If you read the blog posts, you'll see that they have given you such estimates.

From iPad or Bust: 2 down, 3 to go!
Meanwhile, I'm sure many of you are wondering about the other three apps: OmniFocus, OmniOutliner, and OmniPlan. We're currently working on OmniFocus and OmniOutliner in parallel. OmniFocus has a bit of a head start, thanks to the work we'd already done in bringing it to iPhone, so we anticipate its iPad app will be ready in June. OmniOutliner is a little further out, and our current projection is that it will ship this summer. Finally, after we've shipped those four apps, we'll round out the set with OmniPlan for iPad which we're currently anticipating will ship sometime this fall.
Okay, so there's the prediction for OmniOutliner for the iPad.

For OmniOutliner 4, from iPad or Bust!:
Similarly, the OmniOutliner team is also heavily into a major development cycle—one which affects not only the next major release of OmniOutliner, version 4, but also the upcoming major releases of both OmniFocus and OmniPlan—so that team is booked up for at least the next several months. But while it won't be on iPad on day one, OmniOutliner is where all of our projects start and we think it will be a great fit for iPad, so we plan to adapt it as soon as possible.
From iPad or Bust: two weeks later:
Now, I mentioned two weeks ago that we were generally prioritizing iPad work over some of our Mac projects, but that some Mac projects—specifically, OmniOutliner 4 and OmniPlan 2—would take precedence over their iPad counterparts. In response to that plan, I received a lot of feedback that folks would like to see OmniOutliner for iPad sooner rather than later.

So we started thinking about how we could get started on OmniOutliner for iPad sooner. We really don't want to delay OmniOutliner 4, so we instead started thinking about how we could finish OmniOutliner 4 more quickly. We realized that if we scaled back some of the esoteric features which we'd planned for the Pro edition of version 4—cloning and multiple schemas—we could shave three months off its development schedule and get started on OmniOutliner for iPad that much sooner. Now, both of those features are still pretty interesting to us, and we've already laid the groundwork for supporting these in the underlying outlining engine—but we think bringing OmniOutliner on iPad is more important overall, so that's what we're going to do.

So I'm pleased to say that both OmniOutliner 4 and OmniOutliner for iPad will be coming three months sooner!
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by dude View Post
I appreciate your enthusiasm but if you read those post, you can't come up with a 6 moon range of dates. What you get is more of nothing.
What part of "OmniOutliner for iPad this summer" didn't you read?
 
What part of features being pushed back did you miss?
 
 


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