The Omni Show

April Ramm is Email Support Lead and the longest-running Support Human — now with nine years at Omni! We talk about how she triages and categorizes support email, making sure that people who need urgent help go to the top of the list.

We also talk about doing phone support, about working remotely several days a week — and about her art: she makes beautiful wire-wrapped jewelry with semi-precious stones.

Here are a couple of photos:

You can see more on her Etsy store Niamh Gone Wired. You can also find her on Twitter @aprilramm and on Instagram.

Some other people, places, and things mentioned:

Christopher Harrington, Director of Creative Strategy at Gartner, joins the show to talk about how he’s used OmniGraffle since the early days of the app. That OmniGraffle is an open-ended, general-purpose tool has been a big part of its appeal to Christopher: he can do the many different things he needs to do with it.

We also talk about user experience, otters, and Prince. Christopher is a joyful member of the Purple Family.

Content warning: In the course of talking about user experience, Christopher discusses the user experience of his partner Bill as he undergoes treatment for cancer. The user experience is presented as exemplary, as the kind of thing designers can set up when they care about users. Nevertheless, we realize this may be a topic that some people would rather not hear about. If that’s you, please skip this episode, or stop listening when we switch to that topic.

You can find Christopher on Twitter @octothorpe. You can also follow his bot The Shaboogie Bot on Twitter and listen to past episodes of his podcast with Maggie McFee: Ruining it for Everyone.

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Aaron Kwong — jet-setter, Vegas enthusiast, Corgi catcher — joins the show to talk about testing OmniPlan and about the differences between verifying bug fixes and doing exploratory testing.

Aaron started in support and was the OmniPlan PM before moving over to testing OmniPlan. He’s lived in Connecticut and Alaska, and he went to school at the now-defunct (totally not his fault!) Art Institute of Seattle.

Aaron also stars in the show’s host’s favorite Omni video: Monte Carlo Simulation.

You can find Aaron on Twitter @kwongkwong.

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Indie developer Daniel Jalkut writes some apps you might use: MarsEdit, FastScripts, Black Ink, and others. He also does contract work — and he and his wife have a couple kids. He’s a busy man! Naturally he uses OmniFocus to keep on track.

Daniel talks about how he uses OmniFocus, including his possibly unique way of working with Siri. We also talk about how Daniel worked at Apple in the ’90s before returning to school to study music.

You can find Daniel pretty much all over the web: at his blog Bitsplitting, at his company Red Sweater, on Twitter @danielpunkass and on Micro.blog.

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Reid Callan — Scout’s and Keiko’s human, basketball player, yeller-at-friends — joins the show to talk about OmniFocus, particularly the work this summer which is all about supporting new features in iOS 13.

Reid started at Omni in 2015 as an intern, then left to finish his last year of school, and then returned to Omni as an employee — where he landed on the OmniGraffle team, before recently moving over to OmniFocus. When Reid’s not working on OmniFocus, he’s playing basketball. Or Destiny.

You can find Reid — well, not Reid, but his dog Scout, a good and helpful boi — on Instagram at scout_tails.

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Anne Johnson talks about doing support, including phone support and social media, at The Omni Group. Anne is particularly adept at OmniPlan, but, like all our humans, she helps support all our apps.

We discuss the challenges of arriving at common names for things when talking to customers — and of using words to describe a visual user interface. And along the way we talk about the Potatotron, The Big Lebotski, and OmniWarble.

Anne, when she’s not at work, is a singer with the Puget Soundworks chorus, and she was formerly with Seattle Women’s Chorus. Does that mean we end the show with a song? We do!

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OmniGraffle 7.11 for Mac is a very important update — it includes significant performance improvements. There’s no silver bullet for making an app faster: there is only figuring out which things are slow, figuring out how to speed those things up, figuring out how to measure progress — and then making sure no new bugs were added. It’s a lot of work!

In this special episode we have two separate interviews. The first is with OmniGraffle engineers Rey Worthington and Shannon Hughes. The second is with Ken Case, CEO; Tim Wood, CTO; and Dan Walker, OmniGraffle PM. These interviews were recorded while the work was in progress but pretty far along.

We talk about how we found the slowdowns, how we fixed them, and how we wrote tests to make sure we know we’re making OmniGraffle faster.

Jim Rowland — whose career has included driving frigates, placing things in Earth orbit, and graduating from both the Naval Academy and law school — is, to the best of everyone’s knowledge, not related to Kevin Rowland of Dexys Midnight Runners, and he won’t suggest, but should, that it’s time we stopped asking him.

Jim talks about testing OmniPlan and OmniFocus — and then we talk about his time catching satellites and, later, attending law school, taking the bar exam, and finding a home at Omni.

You can find Jim on Twitter @usna92.

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Ken Case, CEO; Tim Wood, CTO; and Tim Ekl, OmniFocus Engineer join the show to talk about what we learned at WWDC. What’s cool? What’s amazingly cool? What’s useful? And — the annual question — just how much work do we have to do this summer?

Among the amazingly cool things are SwiftUI and other improvements to Swift and to Foundation. Work this summer will include things like supporting Dark Mode on iOS 13. And there’s plenty more to talk about — listen in for all the details.

You can find Ken Case on Twitter @kcase. You can find Tim Wood (Tim the elder) on Twitter @tjw. And you can find Tim Ekl @timothyekl on Twitter or at timekl.com.

Lanette Creamer — tester, speaker, cat enjoyer — joins the show to talk about testing OmniGraffle. Her previous experience includes testing Adobe InDesign, where she first met Liz Marley, then a tester at The Omni Group, when Liz presented an elaborate prototype iPad made from a cardboard box.

Lanette gives talks and workshops at various conferences, and you may well have seen her speaking already. If not, you still have a couple chances later this year. One of her upcoming talks uses the metaphor of applying makeup: how much time do you have, and what can you do given that amount of time? What should you prioritize?

You can find Lanette on the web on her Linkedin profile. You can also find her cat Navani on the web. And here too.

Some other people, places, and things mentioned: