The Omni Show

Tim Ekl — who is unburdened by a lengthy signature — is part of the team that makes OmniFocus. He’s been at Omni for seven years, and came here straight from college — where his professor was Curt Clifton, formerly of Omni and now at Apple.

Tim helps organize Seattle Xcoders, and his hobbies include running servers and cheering for the Seattle Sounders. He is apparently on a quest to have a taste of every single beer in the world. We hope that this will keep him busy.

You can find Tim on the web: @timothyekl on Twitter and on his website timekl.com.

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Tom Bunch has been working on OmniPlan for 13 years, and he’s been at Omni for 24 years — and in this episode he reminisces (dryly, because that’s Tom for ya) about the old days as employee #9.

We also talk some tech stuff — like what happens to your brain after you’ve switched to automatic reference counting? — and then we get into counting virtual salmon, rock climbing, and woodworking.

You can find Tom on the web @tbunch on Twitter.

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Evan McNulty, a tester on the OmniFocus team, answers some listener questions, talks about testing OmniFocus for the Web (including API testing), and recounts his history from the Bay Area to here.

He also talks about losing weight — now 235 pounds lost — and how that’s helped him. Hint: it’s not all about losing weight, and it never was. And finally we talk about his Safari Extension that helps people use smile.amazon.com.

You can find Evan on the web @theevanshow on Twitter and at evanm.net.

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Anette Fuller joins the show to talk about storytelling, writing, and helping people — her passions. Her dog Conan does not join the show, but we’ve met him, and he’s awesome.

Annette’s previous experience includes police dispatcher, suicide hotline volunteer, jewelry captain at a World Market, and a Masters of Fine Arts degree.

She moved to Seattle from California — and she loves the rain! Take that, rain-nay-sayers.

You can find Annette @rainyday_writer on Twitter.

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In the studio are Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group; Ainsley Bourque Olson, OmniPlan Prime Minster; and Greg Titus, OmniPlan Engineer — and we talk about how OmniPlan came to be and where it’s going.

In the studio are Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group; Ainsley Bourque Olson, OmniPlan Prime Minster; and Greg Titus, OmniPlan Engineer — and we talk about how OmniPlan came to be and where it’s going.

OmniPlan, originally a side project by Greg, found its way into Omni’s circle of productivity apps — before OmniFocus, but after OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle.

If you’re interested in helping test OmniPlan — or any Omni app — go to omnigroup.com/test to get started. We appreciate it!

And if you’re interested in collaboration between OmniPlan and OmniFocus, please email [email protected] and we’ll add you to our list and get back to you when we’re ready for help.

But first, check out this fun video for OmniPlan’s Monte Carlo Simulation. (We link to this because it’s the host-of-the-show’s favorite.) The video is by our intrepid producer Mark Boszko, and it stars the amazing Aaron Kwong.

You can find Ken on Twitter @kcase, Ainsley @ainslaw on Twitter, and Greg @gregtitus on Twitter. We have also done a previous interview show with Ainsley and one with Greg.

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Greg Titus has been at Omni for 25 years — for almost the entire time that there’s been an Omni. Greg’s superpower is creating new things. Sure, everybody likes to think they’re good at creating new things, but Greg’s different: he’s actually good at creating new things.

Greg talks about the early days as one of the first people hired. He talks about the days when the money came from contracts, when the apps started out side projects.

Those side projects included OmniPlan, which he started working on because a resource scheduling algorithm sounded like a fun thing to write. Which tells you the important thing to know about Greg.

That, and this little bit of trivia: the city of Kent, Washington, just outside Seattle, originally known as Titusville, was named for one of Greg’s ancestors. In a boomtown where it seems like everybody came from somewhere else, Greg is one of the rare ones — Northwest by birth.

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Brent hosts The Omni Show and writes blog posts, articles, App Store descriptions, newsletters, and other things for The Omni Group. That is, he normally hosts The Omni Show, but this week we have a guest host, Rose Orchard, who graciously agreed to interview Brent.

It’s tempting to say that if words and sentences are involved, then Brent probably works on it. But that seriously underestimates the sheer amount of writing that a software company produces.

Brent doesn’t write the manuals: Dave Lonning does. He doesn’t answer all the support email or write support articles: people on Brian Covey’s support team write those. He doesn’t write all the blog posts: Ken Case and others write blog posts too. He doesn’t write all of Inside OmniFocus either: a whole bunch of different authors write for that site. He doesn’t write release notes: the various Prime Ministers write release notes for their respective apps.

Even though he doesn’t do all these things, he does, somehow, manage to look busy. Well, somewhat busy. Busy-ish. :)

You can find Brent on the web at his long-time blog at inessential.com. And you can find him on the Omni Blog and the Omni Microblog.

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In late January we published our annual roadmap where we look back at the previous year and look forward to the new. Ken Case, roadmap author and CEO of The Omni Group, joins the show to go into more detail and answer listener questions.

Last year was a big year and a busy one, with OmniOutliner 3 for iOS, OmniFocus 3 for Mac and iOS, development of OmniFocus for the Web, and lots of important releases for OmniPlan and OmniGraffle.

We have a lot planned for 2019, too: we’ve already shipped a few important updates. OmniFocus for the Web is coming soon, and we have some important new features en route: automation for OmniFocus and OmniPlan, shared linked tasks for OmniFocus, and more.

This new year will also give us a chance to take some time to review user interface navigation and keyboard control. We’ll take time to fix bugs, including those rare crashing bugs, and increase performance.

And we’ll also, surely, have new technology from Apple to work with over the summer, like every year — which is part of the fun of what we do. :)

You can find Ken on Twitter @kcase and on our Slack group. You can also find @omnigroup on Twitter and on Micro.blog.

Previous roadmaps:

2018

This is our second roadmap special — you can go back and listen to last year’s and see how far we’ve come!

Rose Orchard hosts the Automators podcast along with David Sparks. With Ryan Dotson she’s written a new book about OmniFocus 3 called Build Your OmniFocus Workflow.

Rose, our first interview guest who doesn’t work for Omni, is a big part of the community, and she’s helped many OmniFocus users get more out of the app. You’ll find her on the Omni forum and in our Slack group — she really likes helping people, and she’s great at it.

You can also find Rose on her website, on Twitter @rosemaryorchard, and on Micro.blog.

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Derek Reiff, Front-end Web Developer — and ultra-marathoner! — joins the show to talk about building The Omni Group’s various websites: omnigroup.com, product pages, Inside OmniFocus, and so on.

He also talks about JQuery, his favorite text editor, the beauty of Seattle, his dream of the many German Shepherds, and his current love: making pizza.

You can find Derek on Twitter @dareiff.

PS Happy New Year from The Omni Show!

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