[HeadOn]

I personally want to thank the Omni team for all of their hard work bringing this application to the iPhone. I use this app more than any other app on my phone.

So a couple of things that really impress me about you all there at Omni Group. You have been extremely responsive on the forum and with emails in spite of the overwhelming number of emails you have received (I know I personally have probably sent in a big chunk). Also, your attitudes on this forum have always been positive and helpful (same goes for email) which I imagine can be challenging at times when we (I) aren't seeing what we want to see. And most importantly, with simultaneous development on the iPhone app AND the desktop app, it seems you have done a great job addressing issues and making the experience between both apps better than any I have seen to-date on the phone. And I can only imagine that trying to develop and keep two applications working well together across many devices is an exponentially more challenging task than just one app alone.

So THANK YOU!

I appreciate you helping to make my life more productive!

[masoric]

amen to that!

[popesammyjoe]

Sorry, OmniGroup. The fact of the matter is you had ideas in mind other than user satisfaction when you released this crippled software just in time for iPhone Day 1. You don't deserve thanks for that. I appreciate your efforts to clean up your mess but you went out way too early with this software. It is below your standards. You all know it, and every developer and user out there who loves all your other stuff and your incredible creativity knows it as well. I hope you learn from this mistake. Perhaps one day this application will sync as was originally advertised, will allow one to enter tasks without having to wait 30 seconds, will not crash every 5 minutes or less, and will truly implement the vision of Mind Like Water.

I've used too much fantastic Omnigroup software to have expected this shoddy, embarrassing of an effort to proceed from this company. At least you are trying to fix things, but it certainly in no way excuses you from the raw profit motive you took in capitalizing on the momentum of the iPhone launch at the expense of your values and your customers' trust. I urge you to find some way to apologize to your customers to compensate them for believing that you would never take such liberties with their trust -- releasing such a demonstrably defective piece of software in which many of them were literally entrusting their daily livelihood. Well, I and perhaps hundreds of others of your loyal customers have learned better than to trust anything to Omnifocus for iPhone. Hopefully, you can help me unlearn what I've learned.

I'm sure you'll fix every issue, but you still owe everyone an apology.

Sorry for the flame, but I think it sadly is all true.

Peace.

[HiramvdG]

I think everyone will agree that OmniFocus for iPhone needs improvements (to name a few: startup speed, near-instantaneous availability of an inbox input text field, color coding of next actions and of contexts with no actions available, sync speed, stability), but to say, like popesammyjoe does, that the present version is "shoddy" and "embarrassing" seems very unfair to me. OFi is a mixed blessing that's steadily improving. In a couple of months, I expect it will be just a blessing, without the "mixed".

[JKT]

Originally Posted by popesammyjoe

I'm sure you'll fix every issue, but you still owe everyone an apology.

I think people need to keep a few things in mind about all iPhone software before posting like this.

1. It was an entirely new platform built using an Apple SDK that was in flux right until the moment that Apple released the iPhone 3G (and probably still is).

2. The NDA on the SDK prevented any developers from communicating with each other about their work so issues that one group found could not be communicated to anyone else other than Apple. So if a developer didn't happen across some of the myriad number of bugs in the OS during their software's development, they had no means of learning of them from other sources and therefore would have been bitten by them only once their app got into the wild.

3. The NDA prevented extensive testing of any of the apps that appeared on the store on day one and it still does. At the very most, e.g. OmniGroup could only test it on tens of iPhones and that assumes that they had that many in-house to do so. It couldn't have been tested on any iPhone 3Gs for the obvious reason that it wasn't available at the time.

4. The design of the App store prevents public beta testing of software using an official beta-testing route. In essence, every app you download is a beta because of this and will continue to be a beta until this problem is solved by Apple.

5. The iPhone OS 2.0 is still very much in a beta-state itself, which is obvious to anyone who looks at the crash logs it generates - even Apple's own apps crash frequently. The main flaw is so obvious that one developer even goes so far as to let its users know at launch that their app is very likely to crash because of it (memory management and Aurora Feint).

Etc. Etc.

If it feels like people have been beta-testing the iPhone software since its release, then it isn't entirely OmniGroup's or any other iPhone developer's fault, and it is largely Apple's. However, Apple had good reasons for the approach they have taken and it has mostly worked, but there are now some self-evident flaws to the whole process that need to be corrected. The most obvious one that needs a solution fast is how cripplingly slow the posting of software updates to the App store is. End-users should not be suffering week plus delays for fixes that the developers have already submitted.

Should OmniGroup be apologising for something that was largely beyond their control? Well, if it makes you feel better...

[MacBerry]

Originally Posted by popesammyjoe

Sorry, OmniGroup. The fact of the matter is you had ideas in mind other than user satisfaction when you released this crippled software just in time for iPhone Day 1.

On which day should they have posted it, and begun the process of testing it in the wild and receiving (and acting incredibly quickly upon) bug reports, given that they had no way to test on more than a very few, non-3G, iPhones until day one?

Given the complexity of iOF compared to other iPhone apps, I think it's stunningly stable for an app on a brand new, immature platform.

Oh hang on, maybe you meant that Apple should have delayed releasing iPhone 2.0 until they'd given all the developers the chance to test their apps extensively and on large numbers of sample iPhone 3G's, and had recieved and acted on the resulting OS bug reports? Yeah right.

Mark

[popesammyjoe]

Omnigroup is a productivity software company that, with Omnifocus for iPhone, released software that is clearly anti-productive. Apple did not force them to do this. They didn't need an open beta test to figure out that this software flat out did not deliver on its core premise of fast task entry, "trusted system", and task synchronization.

The reason I'm so disappointed is because this latest disaster is so diametrically opposed to everything they've done in the past. Their excellent past makes other users want to launch into an apologetic of why Omnigroup can't really be held responsible for this. However, my statement still stands: they cared more about the $$$ then the quality of the software. They released unusable software. We can admire them for trying to clean up the mess, but it still doesn't excuse the fact that they, knowing all the professed limitations of this platform, just to go out with stinky software rather than keep it gestating.

[MacBerry]

Originally Posted by popesammyjoe

Their excellent past makes other users want to launch into an apologetic of why Omnigroup can't really be held responsible for this.

Not in my case; I'm not aware of their past.

Originally Posted by popesammyjoe

However, my statement still stands: they cared more about the $$$ then the quality of the software. They released unusable software.

I must have been exceptionally lucky then, because while not perfect it was perfectly useable for me even on day one.

Originally Posted by popesammyjoe

We can admire them for trying to clean up the mess, but it still doesn't excuse the fact that they, knowing all the professed limitations of this platform,....

They might have known some of the limitations, but no-one ever knows all the limitations of a brand new platform, and anyway "limitations" and "bugs revealed by experience" are not the same thing. Bugs revealed by experience can only be revealed with, umm, experience, which your proposal denies them.

Originally Posted by popesammyjoe

........just to go out with stinky software rather than keep it gestating.

Well appart from the obvious cheap shot about extended gestation generally making stinks worse, I'll return to my original question - when would you have had them release it? Without real world closed group testing, which is pretty well blocked by Apple (no trial periods, no beta testing route), what use is gestation?

Mark

[whpalmer4]

It strains credulity to think that Omni knowingly decided to cause themselves (and their customers) as much heartburn as this launch has clearly caused. However, if you have some actual evidence that Ken, Tim, et al said "it's a steaming pile, but let's ship it, grab the money, and work the bugs out later" or words to that effect, by all means, let's see it. Personally, I think you've confused them with another Seattle-area company, if you believe that...

[Ken Case]

Originally Posted by popesammyjoe

They didn't need an open beta test to figure out that this software flat out did not deliver on its core premise of fast task entry, "trusted system", and task synchronization.

I'm sorry to hear that OmniFocus didn't deliver on those core premises for you, and I certainly don't want to dismiss any of your concerns. (Hopefully our latest 1.0.3 release has already addressed most if not all of them!)

While you're certainly not alone in your frustrations, I would submit that you're in a small (but important!) minority: the feedback we've received overall indicates that the vast majority of the tens of thousands of people who have started using OmniFocus on their iPhones over the last five weeks are very pleased with it.

We did work very, very hard to try to make sure the app was solid for release on day one: since we couldn't follow our usual practice of leveraging outside beta testers, we pulled every member of our QA team off of all our other projects so they could focus on testing just the iPhone app. Our testing identified 39 different places the app could crash, and before we submitted 1.0 to Apple we fixed all but a few (those few being some uncommon crashes in Apple's code for which we hadn't discovered a cause or found a workaround). We also identified and fixed a number of performance issues, reducing the load time for my database from minutes to seconds and optimizing the common sync case so it could apply synced changes without doing a complete reload.

Obviously, the limited size of our test pool did mean that we weren't able to exercise the app as fully as when we scaled up to tens of thousands of users. But we've been using the app ourselves this whole time, and we made sure it was working well for everyone testing or using it before we shipped the 1.0 release to Apple on July 4.

But again, I'm sorry to hear that the 1.0 release didn't meet your expectations, and I hope you can see that we're continuing to work hard to address that.