iPad Pros

Transcript of Interviews

Ken Case – July 2021

(1m 53s) Tim Chaten:

Welcome back to the podcast, Ken.

(1m 55s) Ken Case:

Thank you, Tim. It’s great to be here.

(1m 56s) Tim Chaten:

Absolutely.

(1m 57s)

It’s always a pleasure to talk with you.

(1m 59s)

And for those that haven’t listened to our past episodes, can you kind of like introduce yourself and what your role is at the end?

(2m 5s) Ken Case:

Sure. So I’m Ken Case. I am the CEO, chairman and CEO at the Omni Group. Founded it with some friends 29 years ago. We actually started out as consultants on the Next platform. So we were building custom software for companies there. And then when Next was acquired by Apple, of course, we

(2m 27s)

ended up making that transition as well and bringing over our apps. At that time, the app that we were best known for was our web browser Omni.

(2m 36s)

Over time, we developed a suite of productivity apps such as OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, and OmniFocus.

The iPad in 2021

(2m 45s) Tim Chaten:

Awesome, and you guys have been kind of all in on iPad since day one really and I wanted to before we jump into OmniFocus 4, chat a little bit about how you see the iPad today, you know back in 2010 you guys did the big iPad or bus post just I think like three or four days after the keynotes and I think the last time we spoke was right before iPadOS 13 was released and

(3m 5s)

like a little bit less than a year after that the trackpad came out. So where do you see the iPad today?

(3m 10s) Ken Case:

Well, the iPad, of course, is always developing, but it still, I think, has that same sort of core principle that Tim Cook talked about, where it’s a pane of glass that can be sort of whatever the software makes it be, you know, whatever you want it to be.

(3m 25s)

And so I see it as a really focused device where, you know, if I’m really going to do a bunch of multitasking, like I’m probably going to switch over to my Mac, where I currently have dozens of open windows, right?

(3m 40s)

And I can just focus on a particular task.

(3m 41s)

I have my iPad right next to my Mac, and I can just turn my attention to that screen,

(3m 46s)

and whatever I wanted to be focused on, that screen is presenting it now to me.

(3m 51s)

And it’s a great experience for that.

(3m 53s)

It’s also, of course, a really great mobile experience, where I can just pick that screen up and take it with me to a meeting, pull out the Apple Pencil and take notes, and so on and so forth.

(4m 1s)

You know, it’s a great, flexible device that I don’t see as a replacement for any of the others it’s just a great compliment to all of you.

Apple Pencil

(4m 10s) Tim Chaten:

Do you end up using the iPad and the Apple Pencil in your own life as you’re just on the couch and working?

(4m 15s) Ken Case:

I don’t use the Apple Pencil except when I’m in person with other people, generally.

(4m 21s)

Maybe in some of my meetings, I’ll come to think of it, yesterday afternoon I pulled out the Apple Pencil as I was sitting at my desk and having a phone conversation with somebody and I wanted to take notes.

(4m 31s)

But in general, I use it for that specific type of activity, taking notes, not as something where I’m using it every time I interact with the iPad.

(4m 42s)

More often when it’s at my desk, which is where I’ve most…

(4m 45s)

…often end up using this iPad for work activities anyway, then it has the keyboard attached and I love using that keyboard.

Universal Control

(4m 55s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, do you see yourself using universal control once that comes out so you can be like swapping between your two devices?

(5m 2s) Ken Case:

Probably not so much, again, because from my point of view, the iPad is the place where I want to be completely focused on something.

(5m 13s)

So it doesn’t really make sense for me to mix that with, I guess, diffusing that focus.

(5m 21s)

I do also use, I should mention, iPads, you know, I have a separate iPad that I use when I want to watch movies and so on, and so that’s a great device to bring to a couch or wherever else and put on some headphones and…

(5m 33s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, definitely. So last time we spoke, plugins had been introduced to the iPad.

OmniFocus Plugins

(5m 39s) Tim Chaten:

I want to do a little check-in and see, you know, how’s the plugin scene for OmniFocus developed over the past couple of years, and are there any new ones kind of worth checking out?

(5m 48s) Ken Case:

Sure, yeah. So at this point, I don’t remember quite where things were at when we talked last,

(5m 55s)

but there was an OmniAutomation.com website. I’m pretty sure that existed a few years ago.

(5m 59s)

And there’s now a page on there, the OmniFocus Actions page, and it has 75 plugins listed that work, of course, across all platforms. So they work on the iPad and also on the Mac and the iPhone.

(6m 13s)

and it’s been really great to see the sorts of things that people are building with it.

(6m 18s)

You know, stuff from plugins that move tasks to projects in a more convenient way, so they can bind it to a keyboard shortcut or something if they want,

(6m 25s)

or they import task paper from Clipboard that will take the current thing that you’re working on and say,

(6m 32s)

“Well, I sort of did my piece on this, but now I’m waiting for a reply from somebody else.”

(6m 37s)

So it will automatically check off that item and then create a follow-up item that’s maybe deferred for a few days or whatever and says, “I’m awaiting a reply from somebody else.”

(6m 48s)

So all sorts of things like that. Plugins for mail, links, and notes, whatever.

(6m 55s)

It’s a great resource, and it’s been really fun over the last few years to see the community developing around this.

(7m 1s)

We have a Slack channel set up for automation specifically, and people help each other there build new plugins all the time.

OmniFocus 4

(7m 9s) Tim Chaten:

So, today is the day that OmniFocus 4 is out of beta and released to everyone.

(7m 14s)

I know we’re recording this a bit in advance, so it’s probably hard to envision many months down the road, but all the bugs are squashed and it’s good to go.

(7m 15s) Ken Case:

Yay [laughing]

(7m 23s) Tim Chaten:

What’s the one to three minute pitch of what’s new and exciting about OmniFocus 4 for iPad?

(7m 28s) Ken Case:

Sure. Well, with OmniFocus 4, I’ll quickly mention that we were redesigning and rebuilding the app.

(7m 34s)

We decided that technology had developed enough over this last decade, and we have some great new frameworks available to us in the form of things like SwiftUI, that we wanted to sit down and think about how would we build the app if we were doing it again from scratch today, rather than just taking this legacy codebase and updating it again. And so we really ended up redesigning

(7m 58s)

around, particularly on an iPad, that was our first focus, in fact, for OmniFocus 4. How can we make this better use the keyboard now that iPads have a great keyboard experience? How can we make sure that the screen is focused on your content more of the time, and avoid this sort of back and forth of moving your focus from one pane to another that we had in version 3, where you would have a list of tasks in the center you’d have some navigating.

(8m 28s)

So you’d have a navigation for perspectives that would kind of change around between showing a list of perspectives and maybe navigating within it that was your left navigation pane.

(8m 36s)

And then over on the right you had a detailed inspector pane, which is where you actually had to go anytime you wanted to edit.

(8m 42s)

And you know, that obviously served us well enough that HRI has helped a lot of people,

(8m 48s)

including me, you know, stay organized.

(8m 51s)

But as I was thinking about, well, how would I really like this to look, I took some inspiration from reminders and thought, well, let’s just start with giving people.

(8m 58s)

a list of their tasks on the screen, showing them that list as the central content and letting all of us edit it in line in place.

(9m 5s)

And so we do all of our interactions in that main content area instead of being sent off to the inspector all the time.

(9m 11s)

There’s still a perspective list available.

(9m 13s)

It’s off on the left margin and you can just tap on one of those to switch from one perspective to another with a single tap.

(9m 19s)

Or you can use some feature that came over from the Mac, a quick open.

(9m 24s)

So you can use a keyboard shortcut, type commando, type a few letters of your preference.

(9m 28s)

And now you’re in that project instead.

(9m 31s)

But really the central part of what makes OmniFocus 4 interesting is this redesign around that content and making it editable, that outline.

(9m 41s)

And that outline is now much richer than it was in earlier versions.

(9m 44s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah. And when I discovered that it’s not just this, you can view this stuff in this outline, but you’re actually able to edit within it, that became super powerful because, oh, this isn’t just view only.

(9m 54s)

You’re able to edit anything you see pretty much on that outline.

(9m 57s) Ken Case:

And you can customize what you want to see in that outline.

(10m)

So in some perspectives, if I’m looking at a list of the work I need to do over the upcoming week,

(10m 5s)

I really want to see perhaps the upcoming due dates and deadlines that are associated with those tasks.

(10m 12s)

But in another perspective where I’m looking at–

(10m 15s)

it’s a retrospective perspective.

(10m 16s)

I’m looking back at what I did over the past few weeks or recently.

(10m 21s)

There I might want to see completion dates.

(10m 23s)

And so in each perspective, you can turn on and off the fields that you care about.

(10m 27s)

That helps declutter the screen because each perspective is not as noisy.

(10m 30s)

It doesn’t show everything all the time.

(10m 33s)

We just had one view in the old version for the iPad and iPhone.

(10m 37s)

But if you want, of course, you can have a detailed planning view where maybe you do have everything visible.

(10m 44s)

And so you now have that choice of decluttering,

(10m 46s)

focusing on a specific thing that’s appropriate for that perspective,

(10m 50s)

or bringing it all back in.

(10m 52s)

And again, being able to edit it in line now lets you see the context of what you’re

(10m 57s)

jumping back and forth between detailed inspector screen and your list.

(11m 2s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, and that’s a very important thing to note as you’re using OmniFocus 4.

(11m 5s)

The first time I opened it, one of the projects that I really want to see all my notes about each task,

(11m 10s)

I couldn’t see them. So I figured out, “Oh, I can actually edit this and I can see those now.”

(11m 15s)

So that is something to definitely tweak as you go project by project and kind of see what makes sense there.

(11m 20s)

So SwiftUI, that’s what this app is written in on all the platforms.

SwiftUI

(11m 26s) Tim Chaten:

What was that decision like to jump to SwiftUI and what challenges did you have?

(11m 32s)

To overcome, to take this approach because SwiftUI is still not—it’s a pretty new language, right?

(11m 35s) Ken Case:

Yeah, it’s relatively new, certainly compared to the other things that we’ve been working with since, well, AvKit since ’89, so that’s quite a while.

(11m 44s) Tim Chaten:

[laughs]

(11m 47s) Ken Case:

Yeah, SwiftUI, but it’s a lot of fun to work with, let me preface it by saying that.

(11m 53s)

It’s a very expressive language.

(11m 56s)

You describe more of what you’re trying to accomplish, and leaving the implementation details to the framework of how it gets there.

(12m 5s)

And that can be really great when you have something simple that it easily knows how to do.

(12m 9s)

It gets more challenging when you’ve described something and now it decided how to get it onto the screen,

(12m 16s)

but what we found is whatever it decided is now slow for whatever reason.

(12m 21s)

So, you know, working on performance issues,

(12m 23s)

for example, when it’s all kind of,

(12m 26s)

well, now how do I describe this in a way that would let it make this decision more,

(12m 30s)

you know, repaint the screen more efficiently?

(12m 33s)

Those sorts of things are.

(12m 35s)

of the challenges that we had to get used to.

(12m 37s)

And part of that is just the learning experience for us as we work with something new.

(12m 40s)

Part of that is that it itself is rather new,

(12m 43s)

and it’s changing a lot from year to year.

(12m 46s)

So when we started building–

(12m 48s)

we did some of our first SwiftUI work probably shortly after that 2019 conversation.

(12m 52s)

In fact, maybe if we’d done a little bit of SwiftUI then,

(12m 55s)

because I think it had been introduced,

(12m 57s)

and we put a little bit in a few minor places in our apps.

(13m 1s)

But this big project of using it for core functionality

(13m 5s)

apps, we started about last summer, 2020,

(13m 9s)

after WWDC, where they had made a bunch of improvements to SwiftUI.

(13m 12s)

And we thought, OK, it looks like this now maybe has the pieces we need to be able to do things like this outline.

(13m 19s)

Fast forward another year, and of course this year, WWDC,

(13m 23s)

they announced a bunch more improvements.

(13m 25s)

And so that’s great in the sense that we love seeing the technology that we’re working with get better and better and advance.

(13m 33s)

It also meant wealth.

(13m 35s)

You know, some of the workarounds that we had done around performance and so on were no longer relevant.

(13m 38s)

It’s just time to throw out that code and do it yet again.

(13m 41s)

But, and it also meant, of course, that anything that we’re shipping is going, you know, requires this newest version of Swift UI because it’s changing so quickly.

(13m 51s)

It doesn’t really make sense to target something that is old and will be replaced on everybody’s devices over time.

(13m 57s) Tim Chaten:

Right, yeah.

(13m 57s) Ken Case:

Let’s let Apple fix their own bugs rather than trying to work around them and just target the latest working version.

(13m 57s) Tim Chaten:

Bye.

(14m 2s) Ken Case:

So, and of course–

(14m 5s)

Not just bugs, but they’ve added a lot of features that made our lives easier, like control over keyboard focus, that’s much richer than what had been there in previous versions.

(14m 13s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah. And the SwiftEI code you write for iPad, I know it’s not a catalyst app. They’re separate Mac apps and iPad apps. But is that transferable to the Mac? Does that make your work simpler to go cross-platform?

(14m 27s) Ken Case:

It is yeah, so one of the first experiments that we did was what happens if we build this outline And then what happens when we try to run it on a Mac unlike catalyst Swift UI on a Mac

(14m 39s)

Well, of course you can run it in catalyst and it would be the same where you’re running it on top of UI kit but Swift UI It can also natively run on top of app kit, which is you know, the apps sort of native

(14m 50s)

app framework and

(14m 53s)

SwiftUI running on top of AppKit has a whole different set of controls.

(14m 57s)

for example, because they’re all based on the AppKit controls instead of the UIKit controls.

(15m 1s)

UIKit being the development platform that was introduced sort of as a refinement of a stripped down version of AppKit that could run on an iPhone originally. And so AppKit has always had more options around things like its text system or support for multiple windows, you know, because it was just a much more mature platform, you know, being 30 years old now and designed for bigger screens that had more.

(15m 27s)

More complex environments going on.

(15m 29s)

And so the Swift UI code that we wrote in this outline to get it working on both, we found it actually did work, but then we had different bugs we had to fix on each side.

(15m 42s)

And so it’s not necessarily that it’s an identical code base, and it sort of still remains to be seen how much of the code will be completely reusable.

(15m 52s)

But some of the smaller pieces of code, like just how do you draw a row of text on the

(15m 58s)

screen, or a particular task on the screen, how do you draw the check circles and so on.

(16m 4s)

Those sorts of things are completely transferable from one side to the other.

(16m 8s)

So we get a lot of code reuse even if we might not be able to reuse everything at the highest level.

(16m 14s)

Simple apps can reuse everything at the highest level.

(16m 16s)

I should mention that Apple has now made it possible to create a completely Swift UI app.

(16m 20s) Tim Chaten:

Oh, excellent. Yeah.

(16m 20s) Ken Case:

But those completely Swift UI apps are much more limited.

(16m 27s)

in scope than what a full blown app kit might have.

Apple Watch

(16m 31s) Tim Chaten:

Gotcha, yeah. And long-term, do you think this Swift UI focus with your own apps will enable the Apple Watch app to expand in ways it wouldn’t be worth investing in otherwise?

(16m 42s) Ken Case:

Yeah, absolutely.

(16m 43s)

So as we spend time thinking about how do we present this information, I’ll back up and say,

(16m 52s)

the work we’re doing right now is shared between the iPad and the iPhone and widgets on both.

(16m 58s)

And so widgets are actually kind of a lot like a watch in that they’re a small little piece of screen real estate that you can present some information in.

(17m 7s)

All that code we’re already sharing for how do we draw a task to a bigger.

(17m 12s)

screen, iPad, or all the way down to a little widget. Well, that widget code can also translate pretty easily over to a watch. Now that doesn’t help us with some of the upper level application decisions and obviously when you’re working on a tiny screen, you have to make different decisions about how the app itself works, how you interact with it. And so there are levels of it that are still very different. But yes, I think having that code shared between platforms really makes it easier to invest in those extra details on each platform once

Swift Playgrounds

(17m 42s) Tim Chaten:

And you mentioned earlier that you’re going a bit beyond SwiftUI for some parts of the app, which would make I’m guessing Swift Playgrounds

(17m 49s)

for sure not an option with OmniFocus, but perhaps simpler apps in the future.

(17m 53s) Ken Case:

Yeah, Swift Playgrounds are a really interesting, well, I think it’s a great development for the iPad that you can now build an app on an iPad that will run on the iPad itself,

(18m 6s)

right?

(18m 7s)

It’s a completely independent app.

(18m 8s)

It doesn’t have to run inside an environment.

(18m 9s)

Like, for years, you’ve been able to write a little program that might run in a web browser or might run in Swift Playgrounds’ earlier iterations, or there have been other development environments for Python and BASIC and all sorts of other languages, right, where you

(18m 23s)

could write some code that would run places.

(18m 26s)

But it wasn’t the same as being able to run an app.

(18m 30s)

With this new version of Swift Playgrounds that Apple introduced at WWDC this year, you can create a full-fledged app.

(18m 38s)

I think it does all of the sort of back-end work of compiling and signing it on their servers, but then it sends it back to your system as now its own independent app that then you can even submit to the app store and distribute.

(18m 49s)

So I think that’s a great option for people who–

(18m 53s)

might only have an iPad.

(18m 54s)

That’s their only device.

(18m 55s)

And they want to learn to program,

(18m 57s)

whether those are young students or older students.

(19m 2s)

And I’m glad to see–

(19m 5s)

for the platform to really get where–

(19m 8s)

to become a universal, I guess, long-lasting,

(19m 11s)

self-independent platform, this Swift Playground step seems like a really important and good step.

(19m 17s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, I’m excited to start playing around with that and learning how to develop some simple things myself, so that’ll be fun.

Mac Only Features Now On iPad

(19m 22s) Tim Chaten:

So with OmniFocus 4, the iPad now has feature parity with the Mac.

(19m 27s)

There’s been a lot of features that have kind of been Mac only and

(19m 30s)

you’re finally able to bring them to the iPad with this, you know, Swift UI rewrite.

(19m 35s)

What were some of those big features that you’ve really wanted to get to the iPad?

(19m 40s) Ken Case:

Sure, well, we’ve already touched on two of them.

(19m 43s)

The inline editing feature has been one that–

(19m 48s)

I’ve wanted from day one to just be able to work with your content right there in the outline itself.

(19m 55s)

And I should maybe mention that outline itself has gotten richer in the sense that it works much more like the Mac app has worked all along,

(20m 3s)

where you can do things like expand and collapse subgroups and so on.

(20m 8s)

And that’s something that we’ve also really wanted

(20m 10s)

and the customers have been asking for for years and years.

(20m 14s)

Quick open is another feature that I briefly mentioned before, but where you can type a keystroke to say,

(20m 20s)

I want to open something.

(20m 21s)

And then you can start just typing a few letters from the name of whatever that is.

(20m 26s)

And it will filter down your list of perspectives,

(20m 29s)

projects, contexts, and tags–

(20m 31s)

sorry, not contexts, they are tags–

(20m 33s)

tags and folders and projects.

(20m 36s)

Those are the four different things that I was thinking of, perspectives folders.

(20m 40s)

Projects and tags, and you can type the name of any one of those to quickly jump to that and navigate there.

(20m 46s)

And so that makes navigating around the app much more efficient if you’re somebody who wants to use the keyboard more often.

(20m 54s)

Or even on an iPhone, you can bring up Quick Open and type a few letters on its little software keyboard and still get there, perhaps faster than trying to navigate up to a perspective and then back down into a particular project, as you would do in earlier versions.

(21m 9s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, Quick Open’s been remarkable to hit, you know, for one of my projects, VI, and there it is.

(21m 14s)

There’s a project you should enter, and I’m there.

(21m 15s)

There’s a little icon on the iPhone, and if I’m just in tablet mode on the iPad, I just hit that icon, and it’s, I think, faster than trying to go through my hierarchy, which,

(21m 22s)

you know, search 10,000 times.

(21m 25s) Ken Case:

Yeah, you know, hierarchy is important in some contexts, and it’s great when you’re browsing,

(21m 29s)

but it’s also really nice to just have these sorts of quick shortcuts to get from one place to another without having to build a custom perspective for each one, which you could do in version 3. Another, speaking of which, another one of the long requested features,

(21m 46s)

I think Kurosh Dini requested this maybe a week after we shipped OmniFocus for iPad,

(21m 52s)

Version 1.0, you know, a decade ago.

(21m 55s)

is the focus feature. And so for those who don’t know, focus, the focus feature in OmniFocus is one that will let you focus the app on a particular area of content. And that can be a specific project or it can be a specific folder or it can be, you know, a set of projects or folders. And so when would I use that? Well, let’s say I’m a student and I’m trying to dedicate some time from each class, some time of my day to each class.

Focus

(22m 25s) Ken Case:

Well, I want to be focused in on that class for that hour or two hours or whatever that I’m that I’m trying to focus on it. And so I will just say I want to focus on that project or that class. And now I don’t see anything else in the app at all until I unfocus. And so I can switch from one perspective to another. I can see it organized by what have I completed recently or, you know, what’s upcoming in my forecast.

(22m 46s)

And it’s still all just focused on that specific task or me, you know, not as a student anymore. I use this in my personal life to switch.

(22m 56s)

All right, I’m focused at work during these hours or I’m focused on home family life in these other hours. And so I have different folders that I put my projects into to assist that focus. And then I all I have to do is change my focus whenever I want to change into one of those areas of responsibility whenever I want to be thinking about something else.

(23m 16s)

And it’s a great way to kind of let me time box how much time I spend on each area of responsibility.

(23m 22s) Tim Chaten:

And by putting your projects in the folders if you just go to that folder and hit the focus the toggle focus button It’ll toggle to that just folder

(23m 30s) Ken Case:

Yeah, you can long press on it and just say I want to focus on this or you can select it You know by tapping on it and then you can

(23m 36s)

Use the focus command

(23m 39s) Tim Chaten:

Gotcha. Yeah, because if you’re in a specific project, it’ll focus on that project.

(23m 44s)

I guess it’ll focus as you go to different layers if you want to change it.

(23m 48s) Ken Case:

It focuses based on on your selection. So whatever you happen to have selected at the time,

(23m 54s)

like if you have a task selected in a project, it never focuses more narrowly than a single project.

(23m 59s)

And so if you have a task selected, it’s going to focus on that task project.

(24m 2s)

But if you have a project selected, it’ll focus on that. Or if you have

(24m 7s)

a whole folder selected by tapping on the folder itself, then you’ve got that as well.

(24m 13s)

So that combination of focus and perspectives really lets me reduce how many perspectives.

(24m 18s)

I have because instead of having to have here’s my forecast perspective for work and here’s my other forecast perspective for upcoming medical appointments or whatever right you know these sorts of things I can say okay I’m just going to focus on this and now I’ll go to forecast and

(24m 35s)

kind of combine your existing predefined perspectives and rules that way.

(24m 41s)

And I didn’t really talk very much about what perspectives are so for those who may not have used OmniFocus much before. Perspectives are just different.

(24m 48s)

ways of viewing your same data. So there are different rules that filter what’s in and out, much like some people might be familiar with for mail rules and so on, where you’ll automatically file things in different folders. Your rules say, “Here are the things that I want in, here are the things I want out, here’s how I want to group things and order things,” and then it presents you with that perspective. It’s a really great planning tool.

(25m 12s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, and with focus, I was trying to research when that was added to OmniFocus, because I’ve been on the iPad so long.

(25m 18s)

I had the Mac version back in 2007 or whatever it was, and I forgot.

(25m 22s)

And I guess, yeah, it was there day one. I thought it was in version 3, guys. I hope it’s been there forever.

(25m 22s) Ken Case:

Yeah, no, it was part of our original design for OmniFocus on when we built the Mac version,

(25m 33s)

which of course came before even the iPhone existed, so much less the iPad.

(25m 38s)

But it didn’t make the transition over to iPhone and iPad until now, when we finally got a chance to really rethink how we’re going to use it.

(25m 45s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, it’s super powerful because I was like, “Oh, I’m in forecast mode, and it’s only showing me my forecasted stuff within that project.”

(25m 52s)

It just goes everywhere in the app.

(25m 54s) Ken Case:

It’s also great if you want to like you’re working with a co-worker and you you’re both looking at your screen You don’t necessarily want all your personal tasks and things sitting on the screen at the time So you’re gonna focus on work or maybe even a specific project at work while you’re working with that person

(26m 9s)

And then you know, maybe I’ll sit down

(26m 11s)

With my spouse at the end of the day and we’ll focus on on personal things and you know the work stuff

Integration With Focus For iOS 15?

(26m 19s) Tim Chaten:

• Yeah, so I’m gonna ask this.

(26m 20s)

I’m not sure if it’s too early to ask,

(26m 21s)

but focus mode is in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15.

(26m 25s)

Developers can read focus mode.

(26m 26s)

Have you guys looked into the ability potentially in the future to match a focus mode to a different focus mode within OmniFocus?

(26m 36s) Ken Case:

Yeah, I think that is a really powerful and important addition to the operating system.

(26m 41s)

You know, again, it kind of matches the way I already use my iPad, where I tend to be focused on one thing or another.

(26m 46s)

But it’s great that now it can also focus what your notifications are.

(26m 51s)

You know, maybe as we’re having this conversation, recording this podcast, I might care about something that is relevant to this, but I don’t want distractions from other things coming, you know, various messages coming on my screen.

(27m 2s)

And so having that ability to focus on–

(27m 6s)

different types of things and filter which things matter at different times is really great.

(27m 11s)

And I think there’s a very natural fit for how that would play in with OmniFocus itself.

(27m 17s)

Of course, you could imagine it fitting in with this focus feature that I just talked about, where OmniFocus would show you specific stuff when you’re in the app based on what your system focuses as well.

(27m 26s)

Like maybe you would decide, here’s a focus that would get automatically associated with a system-wide focus.

(27m 33s)

But you could also see it applying to.

(27m 36s)

Different types of notifications that you get from OmniFocus.

(27m 39s)

So during the day, you know, you have these tasks coming from work projects.

(27m 44s)

And maybe those are relevant to see during the daytime.

(27m 46s)

But you don’t want to see the the home notifications until after hours or vice versa.

(27m 50s)

Right?

(27m 51s)

That you don’t want to be bothered with work deadlines when

(27m 55s)

when you’re, you know, back at home playing with the kids.

(27m 58s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, I hadn’t even thought about the notification angle of that, that, that sounds…

(28m 3s) Ken Case:

So yeah, we still have yet to explore what all is possible.

(28m 8s)

I think today, somebody could probably tie into some of the features we already have without us building anything ourselves beyond the automation capabilities we’ve already built. So what do I mean by that?

(28m 18s)

Well, focus, I think, can trigger automations right now.

(28m 22s)

System-wide focus changes can trigger shortcuts in the Shortcuts app.

(28m 25s)

And so, of course, shortcuts can run omni-automation code,

(28m 29s)

and omni-automation can drive everything in the app already.

(28m 33s)

You could use that as a driving mechanism where when you switch system-wide focus,

(28m 38s)

it runs your shortcut that changes the omni-focus focus to something.

(28m 43s)

And so that’s one way you could do that already.

(28m 46s)

Or maybe it would just briefly show you,

(28m 48s)

here’s your forecast for this new focus.

(28m 51s) Tim Chaten:

Right, yeah. And something that is super simple as well is the home screen customization within iOS and iPadOS and having different OmniFocus widgets depending on which focus.

Widgets

(29m 2s) Ken Case:

Yeah, being able to put widgets on the home screen, just have it take over the screen,

(29m 8s)

much like you could already do on the iPhone last year, has been a big thing for me in terms of my widget use.

(29m 14s)

That I’m much more likely to, well I do have now, a screen of just widgets, which is my first sort of home screen on the iPad.

(29m 24s)

And then I swipe over to other screens when I want to see apps that are not in my dock.

(29m 27s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, right, yep.

(29m 27s) Ken Case:

Although, to be honest, often I just use the keyboard to launch those apps.

(29m 30s)

You know, I’ll do a spotlight.

(29m 32s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, have you kind of investigated what the larger size class for iPad widgets could enable for OmniFocus?

(29m 39s)

There’s just so much space you have to work with.

(29m 42s) Ken Case:

Yeah, there is so much space to work with I eat

(29m 45s)

Obviously it allows you to see more of the content of your perspectives in that larger space so you can you can build

(29m 52s)

For those of you haven’t played with our widgets yet We let you choose any perspective to show in that widget and we let you make some decisions about like how many?

(30m 2s)

Lines of text you want to see per task

(30m 6s)

What you want your font size to be and so on

(30m 8s)

Because different people have different needs there where you know some people can see really small text and they’d like to see

(30m 12s)

a lot of content and other people would really just like to see a big announcement of here’s a few things that they’re coming from a perspective.

(30m 20s)

So obviously this lets you get a lot more information or bigger information depending on what your preference is onto the screen.

(30m 28s)

It did occur to me, well you could set up multiple side-by-side perspectives or something, but one big widget doesn’t really help you out there any more than just having several smaller widgets, right?

(30m 37s)

you can already put several widgets side-by-side and have them be tweaked to be different perspectives.

(30m 42s)

Could we do something that’s more useful than that? Well, maybe not in that sort of thing.

(30m 46s)

But I could imagine, in some future views of your OmniFocus data, doing something like a Kanban view,

(30m 52s)

where you have different columns that represent the state of a perspective.

(30m 56s)

So a perspective is now presented in a widget, and might have richer options for how you’re visualizing that data than just seeing a straight list of tasks.

Perspectives

(31m 7s) Tim Chaten:

In perspectives, are they more customizable on iPad than they were in version 3?

(31m 12s)

I’m trying to think of what would…

(31m 16s) Ken Case:

The definitions of what’s in and out and grouping and so on have not changed because we’re trying to keep that sync compatible between three and four.

(31m 24s)

But what we have added is something that we already had on the Mac side, which is the ability to decide which fields are visible or not.

(31m 33s)

So, you know, I mentioned that sort of briefly earlier about how in any perspective you could say,

(31m 38s)

“In this perspective I want to see due dates but not completion dates, but in this other one I want to see completion dates and not due dates.”

(31m 43s)

that you can do that on a perspective by perspective.

(31m 46s)

basis now, and that customization was not available before on the iPad.

Outlining

(31m 53s) Tim Chaten:

So, OmniFocus began life because OmniOutliner users were turning your app into a getting-things-done app.

(32m)

And it’s kind of come full circle with this outline view.

(32m 4s)

Has OmniOutliner influenced this view, or your experience with outlining influenced how you’ve implemented this new outline view?

(32m 11s) Ken Case:

Oh, absolutely. I mean, through the whole development of OmniFocus from day one, of course, it’s been influenced by Outliner, not just because that was the genesis where it came out of,

(32m 23s)

but because that’s how we think about organizing. I should say, that’s how I think about organizing my own work, is I tend to build it into an outline, I sort of break down tasks into smaller tasks that are meaningful chunks to me, and then I can check them off as I do them. And when, you know,

(32m 39s)

all the children are checked off.

(32m 41s)

If I’m convinced that there isn’t more work that I need to add to consider the parent and then I check off the parent and so on until I’ve finished the whole project.

(32m 50s)

So in some sense, the Outline’s influence is not new at all to the iPhone or iPad because it’s been there behind the scenes from day one, even if we didn’t really have a good Outline implementation on those devices.

(33m 5s)

But being able to have a better implementation on the device makes it a lot easier.

(33m 11s)

It makes it so much easier to work with things like how do you enter your data?

(33m 14s)

Well, you can just hit return, type in another task, hit return, type in another task.

(33m 19s)

That model is so much simpler.

(33m 21s)

And if you think of it as an outlining model, then what we were doing in version three,

(33m 25s)

where every time you brought up another task, you were going to the specialized dialogue that would prompt you with a dozen fields, most of which probably were not meaningful for that particular task.

(33m 36s)

But yet there was always this sort of mental friction of, well, how much should I fill in?

(33m 41s)

Do I need to think about the due date right now?

(33m 42s)

What are the tags?

(33m 43s)

No, no.

(33m 44s)

You know, just capture your information by hitting return, typing in like you would type into a simple text list.

(33m 51s)

If there are other fields you often want to use, of course, you can tab over and enter data into those fields as well.

(33m 56s)

But I think the mental friction around ignoring those fields is so much easier when you just see it in an outline where they’re hidden most of the time.

Exporting and printing

(34m 5s) Tim Chaten:

And as I was using the app, I just realized this probably lends itself better to exporting and printing.

(34m 12s)

Is that something you guys have looked into?

(34m 13s)

I’m pretty sure OmniOutliner does quite a bit of that.

(34m 16s) Ken Case:

Yeah, it does. And we do some on the Mac as well, but we hadn’t done it on the iPhone and iPad too much in the past, other than through like sharing options and so on. I see exporting and printing really as a different problem than presenting stuff to the screen because you often want, well, if nothing else, particularly if you’re thinking about printing, you want to be thinking about, well, how does stuff paginate onto that? You know, where do the page breaks go?

(34m 44s)

how white is the uh the page versus

(34m 46s)

how white is your screen, all sorts of decisions like that. So it’s sort of like its own read-only screen that, and of course that’s another aspect to it, is that it’s it is read-only,

(34m 55s)

you’re not changing it and you don’t see feedback when you mouse over things or touch things.

(35m)

And so so it doesn’t really make the job easier I would say, but it does it certainly maybe makes it easier for people to think about how they how a report might map to what they’re seeing on the screen just because the screen has such better information.

(35m 16s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, and the inspector panels are still there.

Inspector panels

(35m 19s) Tim Chaten:

It’s an outline view, but you can still dive into the panels.

(35m 22s)

How have those been redesigned with this knowledge that people will spend more of their time in this outline view rather than dive

(35m 29s) Ken Case:

Yeah, so this may be something we have to come back and edit later because, depending,

(35m 35s)

but yeah, the inspector panels have gone through a lot of rethinking over the course of this development. And one of the questions that we’ve had is, do we need the inspectors at all now that you can edit everything in line? Can we just move all of that editing function right into the main outline and you never maybe have a reason to go use that inspector? And so that’s been kind of

(35m 59s)

an open question through our development cycle. And until everything is shipped, which of course it will be by the time this is playing, it’s kind of an open question in my mind is, where did we end up? Did we end up deciding we could get rid of it altogether or do we still have them there?

(36m 14s)

But I can mention that knowing that you’re not doing your primary editing in the inspector anymore really frees us up to think about how to present data in that inspector better. Like,

(36m 24s)

is the inspector perhaps just about showing you more details of the content than you would ever

(36m 29s)

see in line? Like, maybe you would never want to see the modification date on a task in line in the outline, but you would want to be able to reference it by pulling up the inspector. Or

(36m 40s)

maybe other sorts of details like that. And then how can we present that in the most efficient way for viewing then, if that’s sort of its primary focus, rather than for editing?

(36m 51s)

Can we group the information in more logical ways so that things that are associated go together better. In version 3 we tried to make that…

(36m 59s)

inspector really customizable, so we let you hide things and show things, you know,

(37m 3s)

by dragging them up or below the sort of “here’s the stuff that’s hidden” line.

(37m 9s)

But then that meant that all of these sort of different fields that you might want to hide or show had to be independent blocks that made you kind of lose sense of some of this hierarchy around well, these things almost always belong together, right? Like the due date and the repeat sequence

(37m 26s)

are very related but so they ought to be.

(37m 29s)

presented together. So as we rebuilt everything in SwiftUI it gave us the chance to kind of

(37m 33s)

rethink what are the groups of information here and how do we present that and because you can customize the outline where you’re doing most of the editing we didn’t need to customize the inspector so much and so we can focus the inspector on how do we best present that data or do we present it at all and can we get rid of it and just give you the outline. So that is the open question and we’ll see whether we need to re-record this before

(37m 57s) Tim Chaten:

[laughs]

(37m 59s) Ken Case:

before this goes out to everybody or not.

(38m 1s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, if you did have like a super minimal outline view

(38m 5s)

I’m just thinking on iPad how cool it would be if you could have multiple windows And if that second window could just be an inspector that matches whatever you’re selecting I don’t even know if that’s possible to read while you’re clicking and reflect it in a secondary window But that just thought that crossed my mind would be really interesting. I’m not sure if it’s worth pursuing at all

(38m 25s) Ken Case:

Yeah, yeah, no, it is an interesting direction to think. And we thought about that direction

(38m 31s)

a fair amount when we were adding multi-window support to OmniFocus a few years ago. But then the confusion over, well, what happens when you close that window and keep this other window,

(38m 40s) Tim Chaten:

Yes, yes.

(38m 42s) Ken Case:

started to raise its ugly head. And so we maybe haven’t pursued it as much as

(38m 48s)

it could be explored, let me put it that way.

(38m 50s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, iPadOS 15, Apple brought basically full keyboard navigation to the iPad and basically navigate the whole system and I believe they’ve, I’m not sure if they’ve enhanced the support as well for developers to do more with keyboard.

Full keyboard navigation

(39m 4s) Ken Case:

Yes, absolutely. They have a much better notion of where is the focus now, the keyboard focus.

(39m 13s)

So when you type something, where is that input going to go than what used to be there.

(39m 18s)

Well OmniFocus, before we knew about what changes Apple was planning to make in iPad OS 15, we were already very focused on this keyboard flow of how do we make this outline something that you can work with just from the keyboard as much as possible.

(39m 34s)

Like you shouldn’t have to lift your hand from the keys unless you want to, right?

(39m 38s)

You should be able to just hit return, type in those things, hit return, you know, tab around between fields, maybe type some keyboard shortcuts to get to different places more quickly,

(39m 46s)

including things like the Quick Open Navigation and so on.

(39m 50s)

So seeing this, you know, both made our lives much easier because they gave us some new APIs and also said, oh, well, I guess we need to start over with some of this work because it’s not going to be built on top of that new API.

(40m 2s)

But the timing was actually pretty good.

(40m 4s)

Because we saw WWDC coming up as we were getting into that section of keyboard work and we thought maybe we should just wait and see what’s around the corner before we fight too hard over some of these problems we’re working on.

(40m 12s) Tim Chaten:

[laughs]

(40m 16s)

Do you have any favorite new kind of keyboard shortcuts you’re utilizing within OmniFocus 4 or even the iPadOS beta?

(40m 24s) Ken Case:

Oh that’s a good question. I wouldn’t say that I have a lot of new shortcuts that I’ve been using system-wide yet. Maybe I ought to be, you know, I still use command space mostly to switch between apps to, you know, quickly get from one place to another. Inside OmniFocus I now of course use the new shortcut that we did for Quick Open a whole lot, and of course I use those outlining shortcuts a lot. Let me back up and say our outline keyboard experience has a rich history now, almost

(40m 31s) Tim Chaten:

[laughs]

(40m 52s) Ken Case:

spanning about 20 years, right, of…

(40m 54s)

development in OmniOutliner. And so I’ve gotten very used to having shortcuts for things like “I want to add an indented child” or “I want to add a new item that is outdented and is also a next row,” right, all at the same time. Instead of having to press return and then indent or outdent, you know, I’ll use these shortcuts for shift command, right bracket, shift command,

(41m 15s)

left bracket. I’ll use shift return to insert a row ahead of the current row. I’ll use,

(41m 20s)

Of course, up and down arrows to change my selection around, I’ll use shift, up and down.

(41m 24s)

down arrow to extend the selection, right and left arrows to expand and collapse the currently selected node or group.

(41m 33s)

So all of those shortcuts are things that have been in Outliner for now literally two decades, and we wanted to bring that richness to the OmniFocus outline in version 4.

(41m 48s)

And it’s already made my life so much more efficient to just be able to use those outlining shortcuts as I’m entering a project there on the screen.

(41m 54s)

I used to turn to my Mac in order to do the same work because I had that same capability there and it made my work more efficient.

(41m 55s) Tim Chaten:

• Yeah, ’cause they’re already second nature even using them so long.

(42m 1s)

• Oh, right, yeah.

(42m 6s)

• Yeah.

(42m 8s)

• And in the process of Apple doing this,

(42m 9s)

they also basically added a menu bar to the iPad.

(42m 12s)

It’s just accessed via the keyboard.

(42m 14s)

Has that, is that something you guys have looked into how you guys will implement that on the iPad?

(42m 21s) Ken Case:

Nah, I have, we may have to circle back about this before this goes out because we have not looked into that in depth yet, at least that I’m aware of, I should say. Maybe some other people on the team have looked at that.

(42m 23s) Tim Chaten:

• Yeah.

(42m 25s)

Okay.

(42m 32s) Ken Case:

But not having looked at it in the first half of July doesn’t mean that by the time I’ve had OS 15 chips that we wouldn’t have, you know, we’ve got a few months to go.

Any Other iPadOS 15 Features?

(42m 43s) Tim Chaten:

Any other iPadOS 15 APIs or Swift UI additions that you guys are excited about for maybe not launch day, but in the next year or so?

(42m 53s) Ken Case:

Absolutely. But again, I think I will need to come back and circle back on this.

(42m 57s) Tim Chaten:

Too early, yeah.

(43m)

Absolutely.

Shortcuts

(43m 1s) Tim Chaten:

And then shortcuts now on the Mac, and that’s going to make the work you do on iPad that much more effective because it’s on both those platforms now.

(43m 9s)

Where do you see shortcuts going for iPad and you know, how’s it kind of interact with your or existing automation in a JavaScript.

(43m 16s) Ken Case:

Sure. So I view the existing automation stuff as sort of a foundation level that people can build other things on top of. And so that’s where you have full and direct, really fast access to our model of projects and their tasks and the folders they live within and the different perspectives and so on. You can manipulate things the fastest if you are writing some JavaScript code that runs right inside our app.

(43m 46s)

this highly tuned JavaScript engine that comes from Apple, right, that they ship in Safari.

(43m 52s)

And so it is a really efficient way to do some complex things. But it’s not the most approachable thing, right? Like, not everybody knows how to write JavaScript, and not everybody should. Shortcuts are a really great approachable interface. On the Mac, we had AppleScript for years and years, which was meant to be the approachable interface. And I think it was a lot more approachable for a lot of people, but it was still not as approachable.

(44m 16s)

as something that did it visually.

(44m 18s)

So Apple came up with Automator, and Shortcuts in a lot of ways, I think, has been inspired by the work that Apple did on Automator.

(44m 25s)

But Shortcuts also built a new sort of robust set of underpinnings for how they talk to different apps.

(44m 33s)

And so it’s really great now to have that model that was built for Shortcuts be brought over to all of the platforms that we developed for, so that you can run the same Shortcuts on a Mac and have it.

(44m 46s)

do the same things with our apps as you would do on an iPad or an iPhone, and have them be a, you know, tie into this ecosystem where they can be triggered by your focus changes or they can be triggered by location changes or just scheduled, you know, Siri commands so you can speak to it and say, “I want to do this,” and it now drives your app.

(45m 6s)

It also is a great way to bridge from one app to another, because if you’re building something inside OmniFocus and you’re writing this in JavaScript code, we do have support

(45m 16s)

for calling out to web APIs, we have support for calling out to other apps with X callback URLs.

(45m 21s)

And so, you know, you can talk from one app to another sort of that way, but again, it’s something that only a true computer geek is going to want to sit down and do, whereas I think a shortcut, that might still be a bit geeky, but it’s a much more approachable level of geekiness.

(45m 39s)

So we already see people, you know, for years now, for the last couple of years where shortcuts that are available on our iPhone.

(45m 46s)

iPhone and iPad apps take shortcuts that will pull data out of OmniFocus and then put them through another app that builds graphs, for example, and then turn that into widget content that is presented on their home screen.

(46m)

And here’s a graph of my upcoming tasks, how many tasks I have per day over the next few days, and here’s another graph showing me the burndown progress that I’ve made on this project and another graph showing me, you know, just what I’ve completed per day.

(46m 16s)

over the last week or something. Those sorts of things are things that are much easier,

(46m 20s)

I think, to build with shortcuts than just the omni-automation JavaScript implementation.

(46m 28s)

So what’s important to me, then, is to make sure that they all tie together into a cohesive ecosystem. And the way we’ve done that on the Mac traditionally is we had a call in AppleScript that said, “Well, run this JavaScript,” and then you could just run any arbitrary JavaScript.

(46m 44s)

we have a URL that you can use.

(46m 46s)

can call – people have been able to use it in shortcuts for years that says run this JavaScript and that worked in shortcuts.

(46m 54s)

But again, that was a geeky way to do things that involves some technical knowledge around URLs and what you can put in a URL, what happens with white space, how do you have to encode it and so on.

(47m 5s)

And so really with version 4 now, being able to just call a plug-in directly that, yes,

(47m 14s)

was written in JavaScript. But in short…

(47m 16s)

shortcuts, you just see your list of plugins and say, I want to call this one, here’s the input that I want to pass to it, makes life much more easy. So having that integration between shortcuts and Omni Automation, and then having all of those technologies, both shortcuts and Omni Automation, available on iPad and on iPhone and on Mac means that,

(47m 33s)

you know, this is this truly universal automation path.

(47m 38s) Tim Chaten:

exciting to see what people do with all this. It’s very powerful being able to automate.

(47m 42s)

Shortcuts really does expand its accessibility to so many more people.

(47m 46s) Ken Case:

Yeah, absolutely, and it makes it easy for people to share, and it’s nice that Apple has made it

(47m 51s)

easier in these latest updates for people to share shortcuts with each other without having to go to some scary preference and say “yes, I will”.

(47m 57s) Tim Chaten:

Yes, for sure, yeah.

The Little Things

(48m) Tim Chaten:

So we mentioned Quick Open a couple times.

(48m 2s)

It’s one of my favorite new little things.

(48m 3s)

And every time I use it,

(48m 4s)

I kind of get a little smile on my face like,

(48m 6s)

oh, I can do this now.

(48m 7s)

Are there any little favorite additions that are just things that people might glance over that give you a little smile every time?

(48m 13s) Ken Case:

Oh, sure. So I guess I’ve touched on the keyboard use generally, right? Like every time I know I can just sit down to that outline and work in it the way that I’m used to working in that outline on a Mac, but I’m doing it now on my Focus device is really, it just makes me happy. Yeah, it makes me smile every time. One-touch perspective access. You know, in OmniFocus 3, you often had one-touch perspective access on an iPad, anyway.

(48m 43s)

where you had this column on the left and you could just touch one of those perspectives,

(48m 46s)

unless the perspective you touched was projects, and then it switched over to showing you a list of projects in there, so you could focus in on a particular project and navigate there.

(48m 56s)

In version 4 now, we always keep those perspectives visible as just a strip along the side. If nothing else, you can narrow it down to just the icons, and that’s all I need to see anymore now that I know what all my perspectives are. And so, knowing that those are just one tap away,

(49m 12s)

Okay.

(49m 13s)

It’s also, you know, one of those features that brings this model to my face.

(49m 18s)

And that’s something that as we’re recording this does not exist in the iPhone app, but by the time anyone is hearing this, I hope does exist in the iPhone app.

(49m 26s) Tim Chaten:

Excellent, yeah. Yeah, the perspectives, they’ve been on the Mac for a long time,

(49m 30s)

and I think in the early days for iPad, you could create them there and they’d sync over to your iPad. And I still have a very old podcasting one with the very old icon that I should probably update at some point. Back from the early days. But yeah, those have,

(49m 45s)

yeah, it’s been fun to see that get more and more full featured on the iPad and iPhone.

(49m 50s) Ken Case:

And I guess one last thing that comes to mind is being able to see my notes in line.

(49m 54s)

So in OmniFocus, on the Mac, you’ve always been able to expand the outline to also show you any notes that you had associated with a task.

(50m 5s)

And those notes can be paragraphs long.

(50m 6s)

They’re rich text.

(50m 7s)

They have attachments that you can add sound attachments or picture attachments, whatever you want in those notes.

(50m 14s)

And they’ve always been very available on the Mac because they’re just part of your main window.

(50m 19s)

they can be hidden or…

(50m 20s)

visible whenever you want them to be.

(50m 22s)

On the iPhone and iPad, they were always kind of buried because they were off in the inspector, they were on their own dedicated tab in the inspector, and the tab was split up between the notes, the text part of the notes, and the attachments part of the notes.

(50m 34s)

And now all of that is unified just into that main outline.

(50m 38s)

You can expand and collapse the notes, you know, depending on what level of detail you want to see at any time.

(50m 43s)

But being able to see those notes just in line in the big part of my screen instead of buried off in a corner.

(50m 50s)

When I have a note that is truly relevant to a task, it just makes me happy to not have to go searching for it every time.

Drag and drop

(50m 58s) Tim Chaten:

One final question. The approach to drag-and-drop in OmniFocus 4 and iPad, what is it this time around as far as dragging in images to add to a task?

(51m 7s)

Are you able to do that with an outline view? Are you able to drag a project to make a new window out of it?

(51m 12s)

Or what’s kind of the general approach with drag-and-drop for iPad?

(51m 16s) Ken Case:

Sure, so all of those things are things that we want to be doing.

(51m 22s)

Right now, as we record, this may be one of those things we have to circle back on later,

(51m 26s)

because it is not implemented yet,

(51m 27s)

because drag and drop is one of the areas that is not very well-supported in SwiftUI yet.

(51m 34s)

It only is supported in certain contexts.

(51m 36s)

In fact, gestures in general are kind of hard to–

(51m 39s)

it’s hard to add a swipe gesture generically.

(51m 42s)

We kind of have to do a bunch of work around,

(51m 47s)

it would be more like diving down to SwiftUI to get to those details.

(51m 51s)

And so I hope that we will be able to do all of the normal outlining interactions, where you’re dragging, of course, a row from one place to another.

(52m)

That, I think, is working already today.

(52m 2s)

You can drag a row from one place to another in the outline to move it around.

(52m 7s)

But we also want you to be able to drag, ideally,

(52m 10s)

from that outline to–

(52m 11s)

if you see a project in the navigation sidebar,

(52m 13s)

should be able to just drop it on a project.

(52m 16s)

Yes, you should be able to drag something off to the edge of the screen if you want to create another window that is now open on that particular thing.

(52m 27s)

We did support that, I believe, in version 3, so it is gone right now in version 4, but

(52m 29s) Tim Chaten:

Yep.

(52m 30s)

Excellent.

(52m 31s)

Yeah.

(52m 32s)

It’s interesting, SwiftUI being hard with gestures, like Apple should work on, it being a very common thing for iOS.

(52m 44s) Ken Case:

Yeah, it’s one of the, I think, issues with, of course, part of the goal of SoftUI is to be able to write something that can run on iPad or on Mac, and Mac has a very different notion of what gestures you can have, right? You don’t have a multi-touch device, and you don’t have, and so the whole experience is different. So they sort of had this gesture support around a limited set of scenarios, like, oh, well, you want to be able to drag things around in a list.

(53m 12s)

at least that is my understanding and I’m not the…

(53m 14s)

person working on that part of the code. So apologies if I got any of that wrong. Sorry anyone out there working on… you know from Apple working on this. Yeah, I’m not an authority on that particular subject.

(53m 26s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, I was thinking about review mode briefly and I was thinking with the Apple Pencil if there was any kind of clever things you guys can envision using that for like scratching off something that’s done and only review mode it kind of recognizes it as some kind

Review Mode

(53m 42s) Ken Case:

I think we could. I think we could, yeah. We have not given that a lot of thought.

(53m 48s)

The level of thought that we’ve mostly given toward Apple Pencil was just around being able to do scribble entry. And of course some level of that just works, right? You start scribbling into a text field and that works. But we also want to be able to scribble on the blank parts of an outline to add a new entry to it, for example. And I’m not sure how much of that works in the test flight today as we record this.

(54m 12s)

But I sure hope that it’s all working by the time it’s shipping.

(54m 14s) Tim Chaten:

Yep, for sure.

Anything else?

(54m 16s) Tim Chaten:

And then anything else about OmniFocus 4 in general?

(54m 23s) Ken Case:

I’ll just note that it’s been great to engage with our community during this test flight process,

(54m 28s)

you know, to find out what people’s favorite changes are, you know, like hearing from you that you’re enjoying QuickOpen. That’s great to hear. I love that, you know, it’s always rewarding when you do work on something and you find out that it is helping people. And so that’s been fun. And it’s also been really fun during this process to be able to rapidly iterate

(54m 53s)

feedback, you know, because we’re using SwiftUI and this new declarative model for building our apps, it’s sometimes at least a lot easier to make some changes to our design based on what we’re hearing from people than in the past where it felt like our code had maybe gotten to kind of a calcified state. Part of this is just starting over and rebuilding things from scratch. We know where everything is again. You know, we haven’t forgotten over the last decade. Oh yeah, what was was that behavior and why did.

(55m 23s)

We do it that way.

(55m 24s)

Um, uh, so this process of engaging with our customers, uh, you know, talking

(55m 29s)

with everybody on the Slack and finding out, well, yeah, this thing isn’t really working for us and like, well, okay, then, uh, what if we make this change and how do you feel about it now?

(55m 36s)

Um, and getting that immediate and direct feedback has been really fun.

(55m 40s)

And, and we really appreciate, you know, everybody who was involved in the, uh, the test flight process.

(55m 45s)

You know, both encouraging us and telling and warning us the way that, you know,

(55m 49s)

no, that’s not working for me, please.

(55m 51s)

you know, or you’ve stepped on some work.

(55m 53s)

So, I’m grateful that it’s been important to me.

(55m 55s)

Can you please bring that back?

M1 Macs

(55m 58s) Tim Chaten:

As I’ve been listening to ATP with their talk of SwiftUI, they mentioned sometimes that you need like a Mac Pro to render SwiftUI well, or just get an M1 Mac. Have you guys been on M1s to do most of this work, or a beefy Intel Mac for most of this? Oh, nice. Nice, yeah.

(56m 7s) Ken Case:

[laughs]

(56m 13s)

We bought M1s, M1 minis for everybody when they came out.

(56m 17s)

[laughs]

(56m 19s)

So yeah, we love our M1s.

(56m 23s)

Absolutely, they made our compile times go down.

(56m 25s)

They made, there’s such nice devices to work with.

(56m 29s)

Even though they have less memory,

(56m 30s)

they get more done per minute.

Ken Case – December 2023

(56m 34s) Tim Chaten:

Well, that was my discussion with Ken from July of 2021.

(56m 38s)

Now, here is our most recent chat in December of 2023,

(56m 42s)

discussing the app’s release. Enjoy.

(56m 45s)

Welcome back to the podcast, Ken.

(56m 47s) Ken Case:

Thank you. It’s great to be here again.

(56m 49s) Tim Chaten:

And congrats on launch of OmniFocus 4.

(56m 52s) Ken Case:

Thank you.

(56m 53s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, it’s very exciting.

(56m 55s)

I saw that come through the social media channels like, oh, that’s awesome.

(56m 59s)

Got it, got it out the door.

(57m)

But in 2020.

(57m 3s) Ken Case:

It has been a fun project, a big project.

(57m 6s)

I’m super glad to have it now be the default version of OmniFocus that people see when they go to the App Store and search.

(57m 13s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah. No, it’s great. So we last spoke about OmniFocus 4 back in 2021 July, I think is when it went to the public test flight. And that’s what everyone has just listened to. So I went back and listened to that and wanted to just open with a couple follow-ups from that because early on in the beta, we’re not quite sure how the progress will progress, you know, with the beta. So,

(57m 24s) Ken Case:

All right.

(57m 36s)

Of course, yeah.

Inspector Panels

(57m 37s) Tim Chaten:

yep. So first things first, inspector panels, where did those land? I know there were…

(57m 43s)

talks of will the inspector panels even be necessary and where did that progress?

(57m 49s) Ken Case:

Yeah, that was one of the interesting bits of experimenting that we were doing, and we were trying to figure out, could we get rid of inspector panels altogether as we make the main outline itself richer?

(58m 4s)

All of the editing used to happen in the inspector in OmniFocus 3 on the iPad and not the iPhone.

(58m 10s)

It wasn’t called the inspector necessarily on the iPhone, it was kind of like a detailed screen, but it had the exact same features, functionality, and purpose.

(58m 18s)

And so–

(58m 19s)

[laughter]

(58m 20s)

And we didn’t want that level of clutter.

(58m 32s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah.

(58m 37s) Ken Case:

We decided that it was cleaner to leave the inspector available when you needed access to that detail, but to never force you to go there.

(58m 44s)

So if you didn’t need that detail, you could stay in the outline and have the sort of simpler

(58m 49s)

customize, which fields belong in the outline, which fields belong in the inspector.

(58m 52s)

And either way, you know, you kind of get that control, but we think there’s still a purpose for it.

(59m)

And it comes in especially handy if you’re doing any sort of batch editing, where you select a number of rows in the main outline, and then you go to the inspector and say,

(59m 6s)

“Well, I’m going to modify all of their due dates at once,” or “Assign this tag to all of them at once,” or whatever.

(59m 11s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, excellent. Yeah. And I’d imagine some people just, they like, they like Inspector Pale. It’s like, it’s a, it’s a comfortable, like old school thing that still makes sense.

(59m 11s) Ken Case:

[laughter]

(59m 12s)

[end of recording]

(59m 21s) Tim Chaten:

As you sever batch inspection or inspecting it, especially.

(59m 24s) Ken Case:

Right, right.

iPad Keyboard Menu

(59m 26s) Tim Chaten:

So, and then back in 2021, we had just got the introduction of iPad keyboard support,

(59m 33s)

more kind of fully rolled out. Did you guys end up with the keyboard implementation for the iPad?

(59m 41s)

End up just mirroring what the Mac got as far as the whole file system? You know, basically the iPad has this menu system, similar to the Mac, but it’s hidden beyond the keyboard panel. Is that kind of mirrored on the iPad or where did that end up?

(59m 55s)

up.

(59m 56s) Ken Case:

There are so many bits of that now that I think about it.

(1h 1s)

We did not end up in the same place as the Mac because the iPad itself has a different interaction mechanism.

(1h 7s)

One of the biggest differences that we noticed, we didn’t even realize it at first, we were trying to make the iPad outline editing experience work much like it worked on the Mac, and you would tab between fields and so on.

(1h 21s)

And then what we realized was, that’s not how any–

(1h 26s)

normal native Mac, really good native iPad apps work.

(1h 29s)

They expect the tab is going to take you to another top level pane, and you use your arrow keys within the pane to navigate to get to your field.

(1h 36s)

And then maybe you’ll do something else to start editing that field.

(1h 39s)

But it’s not– it’s a very different model from the Mac,

(1h 42s)

where you’ve always kind of tabbed through your fields.

(1h 45s) Tim Chaten:

• All right. – Yeah.

(1h 45s) Ken Case:

And so we decided, no, we’re not going to bring the Mac experience over there.

(1h 53s)

That would be wrong for the platform.

(1h 54s)

the iPad experience and do it right.

(1h 56s)

So the iPad.

(1h 56s) Tim Chaten:

• Excellent, great.

(1h 57s) Ken Case:

[laughing]

(1h 58s) Tim Chaten:

That’s the right answer for iPad.

(1h 59s) Ken Case:

[laughs] Great.

(1h 1m 1s) Tim Chaten:

It’s not the Mac as much as some people want it to be.

(1h 1m 4s)

It’s really not, yeah.

(1h 1m 7s) Ken Case:

If you want a Mac, there is a Mac. It’s also available.

(1h 1m 10s)

[laughing]

(1h 1m 11s) Tim Chaten:

It’ll have a very Mac-y, awesome experience there for that.

Drag and Drop

(1h 1m 16s) Tim Chaten:

So another thing back in 2021 is SwiftUI.

(1h 1m 21s)

It was young and back then.

(1h 1m 22s)

It’s done a lot of maturing over the years.

(1h 1m 25s)

[laughs]

(1h 1m 26s)

Back in its earlier days, drag and drop was a bit of a challenge.

(1h 1m 31s)

Has SwiftUI progressed in a way that allows drag and drop to be where you guys want it to be?

(1h 1m 37s) Ken Case:

I think we’ve gotten it to a pretty good place now in version 4.

(1h 1m 40s)

So we have a lot of the same drag and drop interactions between the apps,

(1h 1m 44s)

where you can drag something for mail and drop it into an outline,

(1h 1m 49s)

and it will create a new item based on that mail message with a link back to the mail message, and so on.

(1h 1m 54s)

All of those sorts of things both across apps,

(1h 1m 58s)

like in that example, or within an app where you can drag stuff around within a row and have it go to the right place.

(1h 2m 4s)

of all of those interactions down work.

(1h 2m 7s)

I wouldn’t say that it wasn’t a challenge along the way, and I think the APIs, well,

(1h 2m 13s)

I know certainly many of the SwiftUI APIs have improved over the last few years.

(1h 2m 18s)

So what was challenging in 2021, some of it got solved.

(1h 2m 22s)

And we were able to, you know, we ended up shipping with a requirement that not that you have the latest iOS 17 release or iPadOS 17 release, but you can use iPadOS 16.

(1h 2m 34s)

Of course, in 2021, we were still on iPad.

(1h 2m 37s)

I was 15.

(1h 2m 38s)

And at that time we were hoping, you know, we were looking at, well,

(1h 2m 41s)

do we even require that?

(1h 2m 42s)

But, um, but yeah, Apple didn’t make enough improvements that it was worth

(1h 2m 47s)

deciding, yeah, let’s, let’s stay with the, you know, what’s current or, you know, one generation back, but not, right.

(1h 2m 53s) Tim Chaten:

Gotcha. Yeah. So 16 is required, but not 17.

Big takeaways from the beta

(1h 2m 56s) Tim Chaten:

Okay. Excellent. What were some of those big takeaways from this beta cycle?

(1h 3m 2s)

Like, you got a lot of feedback from the community testing this out, and I’m sure this beta cycle was probably a bit different with the Swift UI and kind of like giving feedback to Apple as well,

(1h 3m 15s)

as things that would be great to have for this release to really make it sing. Yeah.

(1h 3m 19s) Ken Case:

Well, one of the things you already touched on is your very first question, is like, what,

(1h 3m 24s)

do we get rid of the inspectors or not?

(1h 3m 26s)

And, you know, part of the way we made that decision was experimenting with things, trying them out and then seeing how people reacted, what they got frustrated by, whether they felt it was too busy, you know, what, what worked and what didn’t work.

(1h 3m 36s)

And so that opportunity to run, to take the time, I guess, to run these different experiments,

(1h 3m 45s)

bunch of iteration and eventually I think you know landing in a

(1h 3m 49s)

place where we could provide all that power still but make it so much more approachable to begin with and so I think the long test cycle was key to finding that balance and doing it this way.

(1h 4m 4s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah. Yeah, because OmniFocus 4, it is like such a, it’s substantial. It’s a Swift UI.

(1h 4m 13s)

It’s, it shares the same database structure as OmniFocus 3, as we’ll talk about. I forget,

Shared Database

(1h 4m 20s) Tim Chaten:

I’m trying to think back with the two to three update. In the past, you guys would break database sync between two and three. I’m trying to remember like some of the other big updates.

(1h 4m 31s) Ken Case:

We try not to, generally speaking, or often what we’ll do, I mean, if syncing with two breaks, if you upgrade from one to two, for example, and now your database doesn’t let you go back to version one, that makes it really costly for people to decide, well,

(1h 4m 51s)

do I want to try this out or not?

(1h 4m 54s)

Is it worth it for me, or am I going to just stick with one?

(1h 4m 57s)

Well, I don’t know, and I’m putting my data at risk, so I’m not going to bother because it’s too risky.

(1h 5m 1s)

And so I’ll just go back.

(1h 5m 3s)

Or maybe they do it and they didn’t even evaluate the risk,

(1h 5m 6s)

and then they do decide they want to go back.

(1h 5m 10s)

Or maybe they still have some old devices still running the old version.

(1h 5m 12s)

And so they have to keep the old version that supports the old devices,

(1h 5m 17s)

and then they’re also running the new one.

(1h 5m 18s)

So we’ve always tried to maintain some syncing compatibility.

(1h 5m 22s)

And in fact, OmniFocus 4 can still sync with OmniFocus 2 if you have an old OmniFocus 2 database lying around.

(1h 5m 26s) Tim Chaten:

Oh, interesting. Yeah.

(1h 5m 27s) Ken Case:

So we’ve maintained that compatibility very well.

(1h 5m 31s)

Some of the capabilities that we’ve introduced along the way,

(1h 5m 35s)

we did have database migrations in there that introduced new capabilities,

(1h 5m 40s)

like, for example, floating time zone support.

(1h 5m 42s)

And so as you make those transitions,

(1h 5m 47s)

you do lose the ability to sync with the older version.

(1h 5m 51s)

But it’s based on what capabilities you adopt and when you make the migration in your data rather than which version of the app you’re running and when you chose to do that.

(1h 6m)

And so–

(1h 6m 1s)

And to be clear, if somebody does get in that state where like they’ve migrated to the very latest version and then they realize, oh, but I still have to sync with,

(1h 6m 10s)

you know, an early version of OmniFocus 2,

(1h 6m 12s)

they can contact our support team.

(1h 6m 13s)

We have an internal tool that can help roll those extra capabilities back out of the database and restore it back to people.

(1h 6m 19s) Tim Chaten:

That’s that’s great to hear so I could I could dig out my my 2011 MacBook Air and fire up a version on me focus for that thing

(1h 6m 26s) Ken Case:

If you’re really eager, in fact,

(1h 6m 27s)

you could go all the way back and bring it back to an OmniFocus 1 compatible database.

(1h 6m 32s)

But you will lose a lot of things along the way.

(1h 6m 34s) Tim Chaten:

Yes

(1h 6m 35s) Ken Case:

You’ll lose support for multiple tags on a task,

(1h 6m 37s)

you’ll lose such support for floating.

(1h 6m 41s)

Some of the features that were headline features last time around with OmniFocus 3,

(1h 6m 45s)

for example, that’s probably what you were thinking of,

(1h 6m 47s)

like the multiple tags on a task.

(1h 6m 49s)

That didn’t work very well with OmniFocus 2,

(1h 6m 52s)

because it didn’t have tags.

(1h 6m 54s)

We rolled out an update, Tommy.

(1h 6m 56s)

Focus 2 at the very end that just let it sync with that latest version 3 so that you could kind of keep living both worlds a little bit, as long as you didn’t try to assign more multiple, you know, it would take the first tag and it would make them that the context, which is how you focus to work, but yeah, it’s always been kind of a fun challenge, I guess, to think about how do we manage that.

(1h 7m 15s) Tim Chaten:

[laughs]

(1h 7m 18s) Ken Case:

And, but we set that out as a pretty important goal right from the start, because we do think putting that hurdle in people’s way right.

(1h 7m 26s)

When they’re trying to make a decision about, well, I see all this other great stuff, but am I really ready to let go of the old version everywhere yet, it’s, it’s too much of a burden on our customers on anyone.

(1h 7m 34s) Tim Chaten:

No, yeah, it’s an important design, uh,

(1h 7m 37s)

constriction to put yourselves in to try to do that. Um, yeah, and that’s awesome.

(1h 7m 41s) Ken Case:

Yeah. And, and then within a cycle, then we start to introduce those other features and say, okay, well, here’s things that if you’re ready, if all of your systems are now running on the focus 3, you might want to grab the latest version and migrate to the latest thing and start.

(1h 7m 57s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, I think OmniFocus 3, sometime in there, I remember there was like, it asked me, do you want to migrate to this new thing that breaks? And you explicitly tell it to do that. Yeah, yeah. So, um, I don’t think we actually, I actually asked this last time, how do you personally use OmniFocus? Like, what kind of perspectives do you have? Are projects just vague, like a one project per app that you’re developing? Or, like, how do you kind of structure your database and use it

How do you personally use OmniFocus?

(1h 8m 26s) Ken Case:

Sure. Well, actually, I have folders for apps, because within those folders, I have

(1h 8m 36s)

projects per milestone, because I really like being able to complete a project.

(1h 8m 38s) Tim Chaten:

Mm-hmm. Yes. Yeah.

(1h 8m 41s) Ken Case:

The app is never done. It’s not, “Okay, this app is complete. I can set it aside and never work on it again.” A milestone is done. A release is done. So OmniFocus 4 was a milestone, for sure.

(1h 8m 53s)

there were other milestones along the way.

(1h 8m 56s)

Even, you know, like, are we ready for a test flight yet?

(1h 8m 59s)

Are we ready for the map test flight?

(1h 9m 2s)

Are we ready now for, you know,

(1h 9m 4s)

are we past the design freeze milestone?

(1h 9m 6s)

So that’s how I break it up.

(1h 9m 7s)

And then I am able to get that sense of satisfaction that yes, this milestone is now complete.

(1h 9m 10s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah. Excellent. Yeah. So for those that were using beta one on the test flight back in July of 2021, say they just use that first test flight and then they, you know, they maybe got off the test flight and then just now they’re back. What kind of, what’s, what’s,

(1h 9m 13s) Ken Case:

And now I just have these other milestones.

Changes from beta 1?

(1h 9m 35s) Ken Case:

[laughs]

(1h 9m 35s) Tim Chaten:

What have been some of the bigger changes made during development?

(1h 9m 40s) Ken Case:

Wow, goodness.

(1h 9m 41s)

Yeah, there have been a lot of changes over that time.

(1h 9m 44s)

So, I guess, as I mentioned, we did a lot of experimenting with the outline itself.

(1h 9m 49s) Tim Chaten:

Mm-hmm. Yes.

(1h 9m 50s) Ken Case:

The performance is drastically better.

(1h 9m 52s)

Dramatically better.

(1h 9m 54s)

Maybe a better word.

(1h 9m 54s) Tim Chaten:

[laughs]

(1h 9m 55s) Ken Case:

“Drastic” is a scary word.

(1h 9m 56s) Tim Chaten:

[Chuckle]

(1h 9m 57s) Ken Case:

[laughs]

(1h 9m 58s)

Yeah, it’s dramatically improved, and that’s partially due to the work that Apple did on their end

(1h 10m 5s)

based on some of the feedback they heard from us and others.

(1h 10m 9s)

And probably their own work as they started using SwiftUI in more of their apps.

(1h 10m 14s)

They improved what was available for us to use as our underlying language for implementing stuff.

(1h 10m 20s)

And that let us make the outline faster.

(1h 10m 24s)

So, that was a big factor.

(1h 10m 26s)

We cleaned things up quite a bit.

(1h 10m 28s)

I don’t remember exactly when we introduced the perspective bar along the bottom of the iPhone.

(1h 10m 35s)

It was, I think, along the side of the iPad pretty early.

(1h 10m 38s)

So, if we’re just talking about the iPad context, being in the iPad Pro’s podcast here.

(1h 10m 42s) Tim Chaten:

Yes, because if you remember back, iPad was where this all started.

(1h 10m 46s)

You mentioned to me that iPad was the very first crack at OmniFocus.

(1h 10m 47s) Ken Case:

Yes.

(1h 10m 50s)

Right.

(1h 10m 51s)

Yeah, because we knew that we wanted to bring a lot of the capabilities that we had on the Mac for a decade and 15 years and bring them over to the iPad where you would have a, you know…

(1h 10m 59s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah.

(1h 11m 5s) Ken Case:

potentially have a keyboard, at least I do on…

(1h 11m 7s)

like, not on the one that I’m using with you with FaceTime right now,

(1h 11m 9s) Tim Chaten:

Yes. [laughs]

(1h 11m 10s) Ken Case:

but on this other one that’s on the other side of my desk, I’ve got a keyboard.

(1h 11m 12s) Tim Chaten:

Yep. [laughs]

(1h 11m 13s) Ken Case:

Always attached.

(1h 11m 15s)

And so the…

(1h 11m 17s)

you know, we wanted to make that experience…

(1h 11m 20s)

again, it’s not going to be… the platforms are different, so it’s not going to be exactly the Mac experience.

(1h 11m 24s)

But it is going to be a much richer experience than…

(1h 11m 28s)

than when the iPad was more limited.

(1h 11m 30s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, it’s wild. I feel very old thinking back. Oh, well, I’ve had was introduced a long time ago. Yeah, yeah. It’s been a bit. Yeah. So you’ve been living and breathing on the focus for for a while now. What are your personal favorite new little design tweaks or new features that you’re just so happy to.

(1h 11m 31s) Ken Case:

It’s grown over the decades.

(1h 11m 33s)

since the introduction, a decade and a half.

(1h 11m 35s)

Yeah, almost 14 years now that we’re coming up, goodness.

Favorite OmniFocus 4 Features?

(1h 12m) Tim Chaten:

be able to use now day in day out with them.

(1h 12m 3s) Ken Case:

I think the biggest thing for me is having that editable outline right in place. Having it be dynamic where you tap on an item and it expands to show the extra details of the fields. But then when you stop editing that row, it collapses again and you have a nice clean list of here are the titles of your tasks and whatever other fields you may want to see all the time. But it doesn’t have to be more than that, really, if you don’t want it. And so I think that both makes it

(1h 12m 33s)

cleaner as I look at it. I feel I can more easily see the whole structure of my project that way.

(1h 12m 41s)

But I also know that I’m not going in and out all of the time to go edit things. I felt like there was a lot of tapping in, tapping out, tapping navigate. In the old iPad sidebar, we had a sidebar for navigation, but it kept switching modes of, okay, are you looking at your perspective list?

(1h 12m 59s)

No, now you’re down in your folder list and your project list, and you would have to go back up.

(1h 13m 3s)

And back down, and back up, and down, and – so that for sure is one of the big things,

(1h 13m 9s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, I love the the arrow where you hit the back button to go back where you previously were that’s yeah

(1h 13m 9s) Ken Case:

is having this direct navigation. Right. Oh, yeah, that navigation history is

(1h 13m 19s)

not only useful in and of itself, but it helped clean up other things, too, right?

(1h 13m 22s)

Like in the old OmniFocus 3, if you had a link in your – anywhere in the

(1h 13m 33s)

other project or whatever, if you had a hypertext link that you followed,

(1h 13m 35s)

or if you were looking at a task and you said, okay, I want to view the associated tag in its task, or I want to view the project that this was in, if I’m looking to tag you already,

(1h 13m 44s)

or a forecast, or whatever. In all of those cases, because navigation was such a pain,

(1h 13m 49s)

and getting back was such a pain, we thought, well, then we have to kind of put a little barrier in front and say, are you sure you meant to do that so you didn’t accidentally tap and get somewhere where you’d have to spend a whole bunch of taps to get back to where you’d been before.

(1h 14m 1s)

Whereas now with his

(1h 14m 3s)

you know with as simple a thing as putting a back arrow back up in the toolbar. Now we can get rid of all of those dialogues and anytime you tap on a link we just instantly take you there and if that’s not where you wanted to go or if it was an accidental tap or whatever all you have to do is tap the back button. So much better.

(1h 14m 19s) Tim Chaten:

• That’s awesome, yeah.

(1h 14m 20s)

Is, I’m trying to think,

(1h 14m 23s)

I haven’t tried to do this in a while.

OmniFocus Links

(1h 14m 25s) Tim Chaten:

In OmniFocus, is everything linkable?

(1h 14m 27s)

Like, could I throw in my reminders app a reminder that links directly to OmniFocus to do X thing in OmniFocus?

(1h 14m 34s) Ken Case:

Absolutely. Yeah, so if you long press on any task, for example, you can then say,

(1h 14m 41s)

“I want to copy this to link for this task,” and then you can paste that somewhere else.

(1h 14m 47s)

It can be in another task’s notes, and so you can cross-link things between your notes,

(1h 14m 51s)

or it can be in another app, and it will open OmniFocus and open that task.

(1h 14m 54s) Tim Chaten:

That’s awesome. Yeah. I thought that was in there. Yeah.

(1h 14m 55s) Ken Case:

You can do the same thing with perspectives. You can jump straight to a perspective,

(1h 15m) Tim Chaten:

That’s great. Yeah. That’s awesome. Yeah. Perspective would be, yeah.

(1h 15m) Ken Case:

or to a project, or to egg, or whatever.

(1h 15m 2s)

Bye.

(1h 15m 5s) Tim Chaten:

Focus modes could, I could imagine some things, uh, toggling stuff. Yeah.

New OS Features

(1h 15m 10s) Tim Chaten:

Um, so I’m going to focus for, as we spoke about began life back when I had,

(1h 15m 14s)

I was 15 was in beta and now we’re an iPad. I was 17.

(1h 15m 18s)

So I’m curious during this process, Apple’s been adding these new features.

(1h 15m 19s) Ken Case:

[laughs]

(1h 15m 24s) Tim Chaten:

During this process,

(1h 15m 24s)

were you able to take advantage of any of the new OS level features from 15,

(1h 15m 27s)

16 or 17 that you didn’t even know were a thing when you started to work on

(1h 15m 31s) Ken Case:

Yeah, absolutely.

(1h 15m 34s)

This is another place where I’m so glad that we did this transition to SwiftUI,

(1h 15m 38s)

so that made it so much easier to repurpose that code and use it in more places.

(1h 15m 42s)

Because not only is it cross-platform across devices,

(1h 15m 45s)

so we can now share the code between Mac and iPad,

(1h 15m 51s)

and iPhone, and Apple Watch,

(1h 15m 53s)

and Vision Pro forthcoming,

(1h 15m 54s) Tim Chaten:

Yes

(1h 15m 56s) Ken Case:

but it also lets us repurpose stuff within a device.

(1h 16m 1s)

It’s a lot of the logic that we use for drawing our perspectives and the tasks within them and so on,

(1h 16m 8s)

and reuse that for the new widget support that iOS 17 introduced.

(1h 16m 14s)

So we have interactive widgets now.

(1h 16m 16s)

Of course, obviously, we didn’t know iOS 17 was coming,

(1h 16m 19s)

and that feature was coming when we were looking at this a few years ago.

(1h 16m 22s)

But it was then easy to take all of that same logic,

(1h 16m 26s)

and now you can check things off right there on your home’s ear.

(1h 16m 31s)

Sorry, what are the terms and all of the different things in different places?

(1h 16m 33s) Tim Chaten:

The springboard, I guess, the home screen, yeah.

(1h 16m 35s) Ken Case:

Yeah, right.

(1h 16m 36s)

The home screen, you can put the widgets wherever you want them or your lock screen or whatever.

(1h 16m 41s)

And as you can check things out right there.

(1h 16m 45s) Tim Chaten:

• Yeah, the lock screen has widgets now.

(1h 16m 46s)

I always forget about those,

(1h 16m 47s)

’cause it’s also on the iPad, I just unlocked that sucker.

(1h 16m 50s) Ken Case:

Right, yeah, I look at it and it unlocks on that other iPad anyway.

(1h 16m 50s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah.

(1h 16m 56s)

So the iPad finally now understands that external displays can be used as external displays,

External Displays

(1h 17m 4s) Tim Chaten:

not just some kind of like dummy monitor for keynote or whatever.

(1h 17m 9s)

What’s the experience like of using OmniFocus on the iPad with the giant external display?

(1h 17m 15s)

Versus like the Mac experience,

(1h 17m 16s)

you get a big OmniFocus iPad window versus the Mac window.

(1h 17m 19s)

What’s the experience like?

(1h 17m 21s) Ken Case:

I have to confess, I am ignorant on that question because I do have also here on this desk a giant display, but it’s always attached to one of the several Macs that are also on my desk here, right?

(1h 17m 33s)

So, and I’ll switch between them. And even though I have this iPad also kind of plugged up right here

(1h 17m 40s)

and talking everything, I don’t use it the same way, right? Like when I’m thinking about using a giant display, I generally, I’m using a Mac. I’m using the way it manages Windows and everything.

(1h 17m 51s)

So, I don’t know. I would love to hear feedback. And if someone feels like it’s not working the way it ought to, I would, of course, love to hear about it.

(1h 18m) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, but it’s a very good iPad citizen where it gets nice and big and nice and small,

(1h 18m 7s)

like an iPhone, if you want to be that small. So yeah, it’s a very good citizen there.

(1h 18m 11s) Ken Case:

Good, yay. [laughs] All right. [laughs]

(1h 18m 14s) Tim Chaten:

But it is just wild that you just hook up to displays now and have these apps scale up gracefully with it. It’s a…

(1h 18m 24s) Ken Case:

Right. Yeah. To be clear, I’m sure we have plenty of testers out there who are using it this way,

(1h 18m 30s)

and plenty of customers who are using it that way. And so I would hope that during the test flight process, people would have told us. But it’s not a way I personally work.

(1h 18m 36s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, no. Yeah, we spoke about that earlier. The iPad has a certain role in each computer.

(1h 18m 45s)

They have their different roles, which makes sense. Speaking of different computers, different roles, one of the most exciting things outside of the iPad release is the Apple Watch, which I’m a huge fan of that platform. We finally have a standalone app that doesn’t rely on the iPhone for syncing, which is great on multiple levels. First off, it’s reliable.

The Apple Watch

(1h 19m 6s) Tim Chaten:

You don’t have to worry about your iPhone being there. But also, if you’re a multiple Apple Watch person like I am, I have an Ultra and a Series watch, and I use them for different things. It’s always a pain in the butt for apps that rely on Bluetooth syncing because you basically have to have one primary watch and the second one’s kind of short shrift there. Yeah. But yeah, it’s totally standalone, and this is thanks to SwiftUI, I assume, right?

(1h 19m 13s) Ken Case:

[laughing]

(1h 19m 27s)

Right, right.

(1h 19m 33s)

Yeah, no, exactly.

(1h 19m 36s)

One of the nice things about

(1h 19m 38s)

the work that Apple’s done on the watch over the past, you know, decade that it’s been going on, is that it, uh,

(1h 19m 46s)

well, first of all, it’s gotten so much faster, much, a lot more memory and so on, like it’s, it now has as much memory as the original iPad does, and that’s funny to think about.

(1h 19m 53s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, it’s crazy. I look at it, it’s 64 gigabytes of memory.

(1h 19m 53s) Ken Case:

think about?

(1h 19m 57s) Tim Chaten:

And I remember I had two original iPads. I had a 64 gig, but I also had a 16 gigabyte iPad.

(1h 20m 3s) Ken Case:

Right here.

(1h 20m 3s) Tim Chaten:

I had two of them. I had both the high and the low. I did, yeah, 64 gigabytes is a little sucker.

(1h 20m 7s)

It’s, you know, iPod territory. A good iPod at that for storage.

(1h 20m 14s) Ken Case:

Yeah, absolutely. So, not only did they make all of the hardware much more capable,

(1h 20m 21s)

despite it being this tiny thing on your wrist, but they made the operating system more capable and the app APIs more capable as SwiftUI has come over to it and has become really kind of the de facto way to write a watch app, a native watch app. And so, yes, we brought over, you know,

(1h 20m 38s)

the ability now to choose your own perspectives, like the old Apple Watch app, you had to kind of

(1h 20m 44s)

come up with a filtered view of your database that you wanted to see. And you could look at one custom perspective at a time and not even the whole custom perspective. It was like the top,

(1h 20m 52s)

I don’t know, 20 items or something out of it. And because all of that work was really being done on your watch and then kind of pushed over to your, sorry, not on your watch. It was being done on your phone and being pushed over to your watch, which is kind of acting like an old terminal. If you use the old mainframe terminology from, you know, the 80s, where you’d have this terminal and a mini computer or mainframe computer and they would talk to each other.

(1h 21m 14s)

Your watch was kind of your terminal to your phone. And it was literally that back in watchOS 1,

(1h 21m 20s)

where the logic of your app was, in fact, running on your phone. It was just broadcasting screens over to your watch and taking the input. Over time, it got a little bit more and more rich,

(1h 21m 29s)

what was happening natively on the watch. But it was still very limited. Some of the limitations are still there. Like, it is important on a device this small that’s running on battery

(1h 21m 45s)

use up too much battery life. There are limitations on what we can do with a native app.

(1h 21m 49s)

We can’t run in the background and sync, for example. Sometimes you’ll have to launch the app to have it sync. And so, you know, there’s a lot of limitations on what we can do with a native app.

(1h 21m 55s) Tim Chaten:

Right. So if you have a huge, huge database, you probably have to open that thing up and let it sink down for that initial dump of everything.

(1h 22m 2s)

If you want everything on there.

(1h 22m 4s) Ken Case:

At the start. But once you’ve synced once, all it needs to sync afterward is the changes,

(1h 22m 8s)

not the whole database over again. And so it usually can stay up to date pretty easily.

(1h 22m 13s)

It does support push notifications coming from your other devices. So as they make changes,

(1h 22m 18s)

they can do push notifications that can notify our app. And occasionally, the operating system will run it in the background, and it will get to do its syncing work. But again, that’s a choice that Apple has to kind of limit so that…

(1h 22m 34s)

You don’t run down your…

(1h 22m 35s)

The last thing you want is a dead watch on your wrist.

(1h 22m 37s) Tim Chaten:

No, yes, exactly.

(1h 22m 37s) Ken Case:

[laughs]

(1h 22m 38s) Tim Chaten:

[laughs]

(1h 22m 42s) Ken Case:

But all of this then,

(1h 22m 44s)

as long as you are willing to understand the constraints and then live within them,

(1h 22m 48s)

it’s so nice to have a powerful native version of the app where all of the logic actually runs right there on your watch.

(1h 22m 54s)

And so not only can you have all of your perspectives,

(1h 22m 57s)

you can choose which favorite perspectives you wanna see on the home screen,

(1h 22m 59s)

but at any time you can choose others and put them on there instead

(1h 23m 4s)

on your watch.

(1h 23m 4s)

You can then go into the perspective.

(1h 23m 8s)

You’ll see stuff that’s up to date right at that moment.

(1h 23m 11s)

As you check things off,

(1h 23m 13s)

all of the logic runs and says,

(1h 23m 14s)

"Okay, well that’s checked off.

(1h 23m 15s)

So the next task is now available.

(1h 23m 17s)

So it’ll show up when it had previously been hidden."

(1h 23m 20s)

Things like that,

(1h 23m 21s)

that previously you would have to wait for your watch to go sync with your phone,

(1h 23m 24s)

for your phone to run all the real logic and then push a new update out to the watch.

(1h 23m 29s)

Yeah.

(1h 23m 30s)

And that was one reason that we only had one perspective at a time because that was just too much.

(1h 23m 34s)

otherwise.

(1h 23m 34s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, and it looks like you’re also taking advantage of new watchOS features, like I believe they’re in the widget stack if you swipe down from the watch face.

(1h 23m 34s) Ken Case:

[laughs]

(1h 23m 45s)

Yeah, absolutely. Those are some of the other new features that have come up over the last few years that we get to share a lot of the same code that we use in widgets elsewhere.

(1h 23m 54s)

Of course, we also with the new watch app,

(1h 24m)

we redid the complication support so you can now have multiple complications of OmniFocus showing different perspectives if you want in different locations.

(1h 24m 8s)

Yeah, it’s a completely rebuilt app, lots of new features.

(1h 24m 13s) Tim Chaten:

So you could have an omni-focus watch face basically and have all sorts of different ones scattered throughout, yeah.

(1h 24m 15s) Ken Case:

[LAUGH] Exactly, and then you can just swipe over to another watch face.

(1h 24m 22s)

That’s not what you want to look at anymore, you’re doing something else.

(1h 24m 24s)

So I use that a lot actually to have Omni focus on one watch face and then maybe calendar stuff on a different watch face and swipe between them.

(1h 24m 32s)

And fortunately, in watchOS 10.2, the one that just came out,

(1h 24m 36s)

you can swipe again easily rather than having a long press to swipe to get to a different, it’s a settings option.

(1h 24m 42s)

which my wife is glad it’s the other way because she doesn’t want to.

(1h 24m 45s)

ever leave the normal default watch face unless you’re really doing it intentionally.

(1h 24m 47s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, I used to like swiping back and forth and then I had a daughter and then she discovered that she could do that and I’m kind of glad by the change, yeah, exactly, yeah.

(1h 24m 56s) Ken Case:

It’s just too easy.

(1h 24m 59s)

Rage.

(1h 25m)

Fair enough, yeah.

OmniFocus Pro

(1h 25m 4s) Tim Chaten:

So OmniFocus Pro is available as well.

(1h 25m 9s)

So you guys have had this, I think since version one, a pro and a standard, right?

(1h 25m 14s) Ken Case:

Version two. So version one, we kind of considered to be a pro app in the first place. Like everything else was pro. And then with version two, we were in the app store at that point. And we actually delayed calling it version two for a long time. Like version one was originally on the Mac,

(1h 25m 17s) Tim Chaten:

Okay.

(1h 25m 18s)

So what are…

(1h 25m 19s)

Yes.

(1h 25m 33s) Ken Case:

and then a year later was on the iPhone when the iPhone became available. And then, you know,

(1h 25m 37s)

a few years later, it was then on the iPad as well. And then a few years later, we finally decided,

(1h 25m 42s)

okay.

(1h 25m 44s)

Apple is not going to make the App Store do something about how do we handle upgrades,

(1h 25m 47s)

and it’s time for us to figure this out. So we shipped version two, and then we’re like,

(1h 25m 52s)

well, how are we going to, you know, we’re used to giving upgrade discounts to customers who go from an older version to a new version, because they already have some of the functionality.

(1h 26m 2s)

They’re looking for the new functionality, and they’re willing to pay that differential,

(1h 26m 5s)

but they want to pay for the entire app all over again from scratch. And so that was where pro came into existence, because what we decided was, okay, we can

(1h 26m 14s)

give everybody, you know, when you buy the app, in-app purchases had just been introduced by Apple, so that was the other factor that made this now possible, that we could make the pro stuff be something that, sorry, if you had the older version, you would get standards for free, and then you would pay for the pro upgrade, something along those lines. I don’t remember now that the standards prosplit fit into.

(1h 26m 44s)

I apologize for my vague memories of wait, no, that wasn’t how it worked in that first iteration, was it?

(1h 26m 47s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, yeah, all good.

(1h 26m 51s) Ken Case:

But anyway, it’s all gotten easier now that we, once we got to the point where we decided all of our apps would just be free downloads to begin with, and then all of the purchases were in-app purchases, which we could charge whatever we wanted for and make that work again.

(1h 26m 51s) Tim Chaten:

[laughs]

(1h 27m 7s)

With this time around, how do you make the decision?

(1h 27m 9s)

What are the new pro features versus the standard one?

(1h 27m 13s) Ken Case:

Sure. So we kept the same model that we have had in the past, where all of the basic functionality of the app is available in standard. And some level of customization as well, because different people are going to want different levels of fields in their outlines, for example,

(1h 27m 32s)

by default. But if you wanted to do richer customization, where you have a custom perspective that has its own set of rules for what content goes in it, that has its own sets of custom

(1h 27m 43s)

that get displayed or edited, then those are pro features. And so the custom perspectives have been features that are pro features as long as we’ve had a pro edition hint.

(1h 27m 59s)

So that’s one of the features, of course, that remains a pro feature now. The focus mode,

(1h 28m 5s)

which is another favorite feature that I forgot to mention when we were talking about favorite features. We’ve always had a focus mode on Mac.

(1h 28m 13s)

I don’t want to be distracted by all of my personal tasks when I’m at work. And then I go home at the end of the day and I’m like, okay, I don’t want to see work anymore. It’s time to focus on personal, on recreation, on what shows am I going to watch or whatever.

(1h 28m 31s)

However you want to use your database. And so that focus feature is also a pro feature.

(1h 28m 43s)

The ultimate customization is on the automation support where you can write JavaScript plugins,

(1h 28m 48s)

where you can use that to do templates or integrations with other apps, all sorts of different things that that enables. And that is also a pro feature. And so there are a few other minor things like being able to change the app icon, a little fun thing.

(1h 29m 4s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah. And once a feature is a pro feature, like OmniFocus 2 Pro, everything from pro on that version continues to be pro. Has anything shifted down over the

(1h 29m 16s) Ken Case:

That’s a great question. I don’t think anything has in OmniFocus. It certainly has in some of our other apps at times. I guess we thought about where the pro split should happen for OmniGraffle or something that, you know, over time that boundary can change. But I think we had a pretty good notion from the start with OmniFocus of, okay, well, this is stuff that is is basic that you can’t really feel like this is a good solid.

(1h 29m 46s)

without it. And of course, a basic OmniFocus has to be richer than something like Reminders because that’s free and built in, right? So the basic OmniFocus is still a very powerful tool, but it’s not nearly as customizable as the pro OmniFocus. And that’s kind of where we draw the line. It’s like what level of customization?

Getting Started with OmniFocus

(1h 30m 6s) Tim Chaten:

So for those new to OmniFocus, they’ve never tried before, how would you advise people to get started with this app?

(1h 30m 12s)

And I know there’s an awesome reference manual if you are into reading that’s very detailed

(1h 30m 17s) Ken Case:

Yeah, thank you. Well, of course, I think the best way to get started is to download the free trial.

(1h 30m 23s)

So, you know, we do make it freely available on the App Store. One of my pet peeves about the App Store is that if our app is free to download, it lists us as a free app. It’s not a free app, right? We do have a free trial. We would love to be able to voluntarily list their app as a paid app in the App Store. But anyway, sorry, I digress. So, yeah,

(1h 30m 45s)

Yeah, download the free trial.

(1h 30m 47s)

It out, try it out for a few weeks.

(1h 30m 48s)

There is a built-in tutorial that you can, that you can add that is

(1h 30m 51s)

customized to whatever device you’re using.

(1h 30m 53s)

So, you know, if you’re on the iPhone or the iPad or the Mac, you get.

(1h 30m 57s)

Separate different versions of that little, you know, welcome to OmniFocus kind of tutorial.

(1h 31m 1s)

And, uh, and as you go through there, you know, it will teach you the fundamentals of how to use the app.

(1h 31m 7s)

And I think that’s a fun way to get started.

(1h 31m 9s)

There are lots of places you can go from there, different tools from different,

(1h 31m 13s)

you know, people like Tim Stringer over at LearnOmniFocus.com

(1h 31m 17s)

is a great set of classes and courses and so on.

(1h 31m 21s)

Kurosh has some great material with a book that he wrote,

(1h 31m 27s)

goodness, what has it been, over a decade ago, I guess now,

(1h 31m 31s)

about, you know, finding flow with OmniFocus and so on.

(1h 31m 34s)

So, yeah, a lot of tools out there and resources out there.

(1h 31m 38s)

And of course, you’re welcome to contact us and we are happy to share others that we find and learn about.

(1h 31m 44s) Tim Chaten:

Awesome. And the free trial, do you pick if it’s standard or pro or how does that work out?

(1h 31m 47s) Ken Case:

When you’re in the trial mode, there’s a switch in the licensing pane where you can switch between pro and standard. So you can see, you can find out what the difference is. Yeah, exactly.

(1h 31m 58s) Tim Chaten:

Oh, nice, so you can experience both worlds, yeah, that’s nice, yeah.

(1h 32m 2s) Ken Case:

Make it really easy on everybody. In fact, when you buy pro, you still have that switch,

(1h 32m 6s)

because we figure sometimes when somebody like Tim Stringer, in our earlier example,

(1h 32m 12s)

he’s gonna wanna do a course and maybe he’ll wanna be teaching people who don’t have pro.

(1h 32m 17s)

And it’s handy for him to be able to turn that off and see exactly what they would be seeing.

A single purchase

(1h 32m 21s) Tim Chaten:

And then, for the first time ever at the Omni Group, OmniFocus 4 is a single purchase for iPad, iPhone, Apple Watch, and the Mac.

(1h 32m 29s)

Can you tell me a bit about this shift and how this is accomplished and the constraints of the App Store, where people…

(1h 32m 35s)

I don’t know if you can still buy the Mac version directly from you and how upgrades would work.

(1h 32m 40s)

Like, if I only own the Mac version, does that mean I can also get this new one purchase to get everything?

(1h 32m 45s) Ken Case:

Yes. One purchase gets you everything,

(1h 32m 47s)

and this is the first time we’ve done it at an app’s launch.

(1h 32m 51s)

It’s not the first app we’ve done it for,

(1h 32m 52s)

so OmniPlan 4 actually has this already in there,

(1h 32m 56s)

but we didn’t launch OmniPlan 4 simultaneously across all these platforms,

(1h 33m)

so we shipped it for the Mac first and then for the iPad and iPhone later on, like a year later.

(1h 33m 5s)

This is the first time we’ve put the whole app together,

(1h 33m 9s)

launched it as one, and the purchase was available as a universal purchase right at the start.

(1h 33m 15s)

The way that works is wherever you buy it,

(1h 33m 19s)

whether you’re buying it through in-app purchase on the App Store or whether you’re buying it on our online store,

(1h 33m 26s)

maybe you downloaded it from our website,

(1h 33m 28s)

and so it doesn’t have in-app purchase there,

(1h 33m 30s)

you do the purchase on our store.omnigroup.com.

(1h 33m 33s)

But wherever you buy it,

(1h 33m 36s)

your purchase is associated with your Omni account,

(1h 33m 38s)

and this is much like using a Microsoft account for Microsoft 365,

(1h 33m 42s)

And you know, when you buy office somewhere, then it’s licensed everywhere.

(1h 33m 45s)

If you buy OmniPoco somewhere, it’s licensed everywhere.

(1h 33m 48s)

You just have to sign into the same account so that we know you’re licensed.

(1h 33m 51s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah. That’s awesome. And it’s, I guess it’s pretty awesome that Apple’s flexible enough to allow this,

(1h 33m 57s)

like, because some customers may not even pay Apple money for this at all. It just directly through you, which is great. That option is available. Like this is something that I didn’t think was super easy to implement. So that’s great. Yes.

(1h 34m 12s) Ken Case:

I mean, Netflix has been doing this for years,

(1h 34m 14s)

Microsoft has been doing it for years as well,

(1h 34m 16s)

so it’s not new to us, for sure.

(1h 34m 19s)

We’re not trotting new ground here,

(1h 34m 21s)

but I don’t begrudge Apple their cut of our sales that come through their in-app purchase in their platform.

(1h 34m 31s)

When people download it that way and buy it that way,

(1h 34m 36s)

that pushes us up in Apple’s charts,

(1h 34m 38s)

that increases our visibility in the App Store,

(1h 34m 40s)

that makes it easier for other people to find us.

(1h 34m 42s)

There are pluses and minuses either way,

(1h 34m 44s)

but we’re happy however people want to buy it,

(1h 34m 47s)

that we just want to give people options.

(1h 34m 50s)

Much like we want to give people options when they buy it,

(1h 34m 52s)

whether they would like to pay once for OmniFocus 4,

(1h 34m 56s)

for every version of OmniFocus 4,

(1h 34m 59s)

till version 5 comes out,

(1h 35m)

which some time down the road,

(1h 35m 4s)

or if they would prefer the annual subscription approach or the monthly subscription approach.

(1h 35m 9s)

Many apps now.

(1h 35m 12s)

We think it’s a fine model for people who want it, but we don’t want to force it on anyone.

(1h 35m 19s)

And so we offer both options. You can license the app using a subscription.

(1h 35m 23s)

You can license the app by paying us once for this version.

visionOS

(1h 35m 28s) Tim Chaten:

So hypothetically, if a Vision OS version of OmniFocus 4 was released at some point in the future, who knows when,

(1h 35m 36s)

would you aim to include it in this same license that you’ve already paid for for this original launch?

(1h 35m 43s) Ken Case:

Well, wouldn’t it be awkward if we had just spent all this time unifying our purchase and making it universal and then said, “Oh, sorry, this one’s now a separate purchase.”

(1h 35m 48s) Tim Chaten:

You know, the 30, you, you can afford it.

(1h 35m 55s)

You just spent $3,500.

(1h 35m 58s) Ken Case:

So we do plan to make it part of the universal purchase.

(1h 36m 2s)

But when you buy the app, you get it everywhere.

(1h 36m 5s)

And we mean everywhere that we don’t have to run something to make it happen.

(1h 36m 13s)

One place that you don’t get is OmniFocus for the web, which we have to run a service there.

(1h 36m 20s)

And when you’re paying for a subscription for OmniFocus for the web, which you can do as a separate add-on subscription, or it’s bundled with the other subscription if you go the subscription route generally.

(1h 36m 32s)

If you buy it separately, what you’re paying for is the time for our sysadmins to keep those servers running, maintain stuff, keep it up to date, all the work that goes into maintaining and keeping that.

(1h 36m 43s)

service available and running.

(1h 36m 44s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, because that’s more of a service than a just a download and it’s running.

(1h 36m 48s) Ken Case:

Yeah, I mean, you’re actually, you’re literally running a copy of all of the OmniFocus code on one of our Macs.

(1h 36m 55s)

You know, we have several Mac minis that we just upgraded to,

(1h 37m)

you know, to Apple Silicon hardware.

(1h 37m 1s)

They had been Intel hardware, but now they’re, you know, we wanted them to run the same latest logic that we have in OmniFocus for.

(1h 37m 8s)

And so, so we upgraded, you know, we upgraded to the latest of everything.

(1h 37m 13s)

And then like, okay, now we’ll, we’ll run these OmniFocus server processes over on those.

Moving other apps to SwiftUI

(1h 37m 18s) Tim Chaten:

It’s got to feel pretty good having OmniFocus 4 out and SwiftUI and being able to use Apple’s modern tools as they come out.

(1h 37m 25s)

Has this experience energized you to potentially do this shift with some of your other apps when they reach their big times for upgrades?

(1h 37m 39s) Ken Case:

Yeah, so since the last time we talked, we’ve started a public test flight of Omni Graffle 8, and it is doing much the same thing where all of the inspectors have now been rebuilt using SwiftUI, where all of this is now happening in other apps as well.

(1h 37m 58s)

It will take time to do this sort of transition for all of our apps because we have a lot of complex apps.

(1h 38m 5s)

And so there’s a lot of work that has gone into them over the years.

(1h 38m 9s)

And we don’t want to lose anything in this transition with any of them.

(1h 38m 12s)

And so this won’t be an overnight transition, but it’s certainly the direction we’re headed.

(1h 38m 18s)

I think it makes sense.

(1h 38m 19s) Tim Chaten:

I will say OmniGraffle could be interesting in Vision OS.

(1h 38m 23s) Ken Case:

It could, couldn’t it?

(1h 38m 27s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah.

(1h 38m 28s) Ken Case:

Yeah, we’re planning to bring all of our apps to Vision OS.

(1h 38m 31s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, no, that’s awesome. Yeah, no, I’m excited for that. Hopefully that will be easy enough to purchase next year whenever it launches. We’ll see. We’ll see. Yeah.

(1h 38m 39s) Ken Case:

Yeah, I look forward to finding out how soon that launches and being able to have one at home.

(1h 38m 47s) Tim Chaten:

Right? Yep, absolutely.

(1h 38m 47s) Ken Case:

Yeah.

(1h 38m 48s)

Yeah.

(1h 38m 49s) Tim Chaten:

So, a whole different podcast, yes.

(1h 38m 49s) Ken Case:

But that’s a whole different podcast topic.

(1h 38m 53s) Tim Chaten:

So, anything about OmniFocus 4 we haven’t covered yet that you’d like to before we wrap it up?

Anything else?

(1h 39m) Ken Case:

I mean, so I guess we’ve talked about the, uh, the balanced experience.

(1h 39m 6s)

So we, you know, retaining the power while having this much more approachable design.

(1h 39m 9s)

We’ve already talked about the universal purchase.

(1h 39m 12s)

I think we’ve hit on the, uh, the big highlights really for the release.

(1h 39m 15s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah, absolutely. And congrats again on your launch. OmniFocus 4, this is really, really incredible.

(1h 39m 15s) Ken Case:

Yeah.

(1h 39m 15s)

Thank you.

(1h 39m 16s)

[laughs]

(1h 39m 23s) Tim Chaten:

Have it for the holidays to be playing around with as I have some time off.

(1h 39m 27s) Ken Case:

Yeah, it’s good timing for us because we know that a lot of our customers, you know, particularly when we get to New Year’s, they start wanting to think about, well, how do I want my system to work?

(1h 39m 38s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah.

(1h 39m 38s) Ken Case:

And they’re revamping everything.

(1h 39m 39s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah.

(1h 39m 40s) Ken Case:

And we didn’t want people to have to do that in OmniFocus 3 yet another year.

(1h 39m 40s) Tim Chaten:

And am I right, does Apple, do they still shut down the app store at the end of the year?

(1h 39m 43s) Ken Case:

It’s time for OmniFocus 4 to be available to everyone.

(1h 39m 46s)

So here it is.

(1h 39m 52s) Tim Chaten:

Is that a thing that happens?

(1h 39m 53s) Ken Case:

So they have done that for many years. This year, though, the letter that we got from Apple was that it would not be shutting, like they don’t shut down new submissions, but it will be,

(1h 40m 5s)

I think the review times and so on, they warned would be slower because they won’t have as,

(1h 40m 9s)

you know, people do take vacations over the holidays and that’s fair.

(1h 40m 12s)

We want them to be able to do that and come back refreshed. So.

(1h 40m 13s) Tim Chaten:

But yeah, yeah, I was just like, I was gonna say it’s great you made it before the cut off of submissions or whatnot, yeah.

(1h 40m 20s) Ken Case:

Brain.

(1h 40m 21s)

[laughter]

(1h 40m 21s) Tim Chaten:

Yeah.

Where Can People Find More Information?

(1h 40m 22s) Tim Chaten:

Well, where can people find more information about OmniFocus 4 and your other…

(1h 40m 23s) Ken Case:

Sure. So OmniFocus specifically, you can find it omnifocus.com. That makes that easy. And we talked a little bit about some of the automation stuff today. You can find that work, like the plugins and so on, and I assume we’ll have some show notes with links, but at omni-automation.com.

(1h 40m 45s)

And then all of our apps to help you be more productive can be found at omnigroup.com.

(1h 40m 53s)

And then, of course, we have OmniFocus, of course, but also OmniOutliner that we’ve talked about some here in today’s show, but also OmniPlan, which does Gantt charts and that sort of traditional project scheduling for more complex project needs. And then OmniGraffle,

(1h 41m 8s)

which is our diagramming software.

(1h 41m 9s) Tim Chaten:

Excellent, and yeah, congrats on the launch of OmniFocus 4. It’s now available as you listen to this.

(1h 41m 9s) Ken Case:

All right. Thank you, Tim.

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