The Omni Show

Tami Snyder — Voice of Omni, helper of people in and out of the company, coffee expert — joins the show to talk about working as an Operations Assistant and the big, varied list of things this actually means.

Though it’s a few years old, Tami’s bio on our About Omni page is worth quoting:

Tami somehow entered the realms of Omni without ever having heard of Battlestar Galactica or playing World of Warcraft. She studied Psychology at Seattle Pacific University and worked with troubled adolescent boys. She later became a certified bra fitter at Nordstrom’s. She has a green Jeep Wrangler named Jewel and organizes “boutique-style” yard sales. She refuses to define what “boutique-style” means, so we assume cookies. Tami fiercely defends our gates, protecting us from scary folk like the delivery folks.

(Tip! To read a person’s bio on our About page, just click on their picture.)

Some other people, places, and things mentioned:

Terry Stearns — Vermontian, chef, musician — joins the show in the middle of the last afternoon of his last day, after 19 years of making us wonderful lunches and dinners.

We will miss him, and we wish him all the best in his next adventure. We’re so glad to get his voice on the record, and to bring a little bit of Terry to you.

Some other people, places, and things mentioned:

Aaron Cherof — native Floridian, indoor cat, piano man — is one of the folks who answers your questions when you write — or call — in. We talk about how support works and about the support team’s important role in product decisions.

Aaron, a Berklee College of Music graduate, has also written music for a number of Omni videos — and he wrote the theme music for this show. Thanks to Aaron it’s not just awkward silence when the host calls for “Music!” at the beginning and end of every show. :)

He’s also branched out into sound design for apps: the recent OmniFocus 3 for iOS includes his sound effects.

You can find Aaron on Twitter @cherof, and you can find his music at cherof.com, cherof.bandcamp.com, Apple Music, Spotify, and Google Play. Check it out!

Some other people, places, and things mentioned:

This week, a full panel of guests joins us live at the NextDoor developer conference. We discuss the upcoming iOS and macOS features announced during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference, and what it means for the future of apps.

On the panel are:

Special thanks to Solomon Klein of NextDoor for recording this episode on location.

Some other people, places, and things mentioned:

Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group; Dave Messent, OmniFocus product manager; and Tim Ekl, OmniFocus engineer, join the show for a special episode to talk about HEY IT’S LAUNCH DAY WOO-HOO!

We look back on the two years of work on this release — all the database and syncing groundwork, new user interface, and new features — and how all these different pieces didn’t come together until near the end. But then they did!

While the app looks familiar — which is entirely by design — this release is a much more dramatic improvement than it appears on the surface. And we’re very proud of the whole team.

And now our Support Humans, who’ve done so marvelously well during the beta program, get even busier as OmniFocus 3 is now available on the App Store. We’ve got WWDC next week, and our designers, engineers, and testers are back to working on OmniFocus for Mac, OmniFocus for the Web, and more new features for OmniFocus 3 for iOS.

It’s almost the company motto: “Work continues!”

You can find Ken @kcase on Twitter, Dave @dmessent, and Tim @timothyekl and on the web. You can also find @omnigroup on Twitter and on Micro.blog.

Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group, and Dave Messent, OmniFocus product manager, join the show for a special episode to talk about the enhancements to custom perspectives, a feature in OmniFocus Pro 3.

Custom perspectives now work with tags (new in OmniFocus 3), which make for even more powerful ways to view your data.

The perspective editor has been enhanced to make perspectives easier to set up, by showing you just what you need to see at any given moment. And the editor now supports complex queries: you can combine and filter using all, any, and none.

And plus — bonus points — you can not only set a custom icon (any image) for each custom perspective, you can also set a tint color! Which is a small thing, sure, but is surprisingly nice. :)

You can find Ken @kcase and Dave @dmessent on Twitter. You can also find @omnigroup on Twitter and on Micro.blog.

Shannon Hughes — French toast enjoyer, math understander, frequent robot — joins the show to talk about working on OmniGraffle. Which, apparently, involves a whole bunch of different types of rectangles.

Shannon started at Omni a week before your host, and started out on the OmniGraffle team and has been there ever since. Your rectangles are in the best possible hands.

Some other people, places, and things mentioned:

Dave Messent, OmniFocus product manager; Tim Ekl, OmniFocus engineer; and Jim Correia, OmniFocus engineer join the show for a special episode to talk about OmniFocus 3 for iOS and several new features: flexible inspectors, enhanced repeating tasks, batch editing, and the interleaved Forecast view.

In OmniFocus 3 for iOS, inspectors are now customizable: you can make them work the way you want them to work.

We’ve given repeated tasks more real-world options — such as the last weekday of the month — and we’ve applied progressive disclosure to the interface so they’re easy to set up.

Batch editing — which makes making bulk changes easier — was brought over from the Mac to iOS.

And in the Forecast view we’ve interleaved tasks and calendar events, which makes it easy to plan and to see how your day fits together.

You can find Dave @dmessent on Twitter, Tim on Twitter @timothyekl and on the web, and Jim on Twitter @jimcorreia.

For more about OmniFocus 3, read the Omni Roadmap 2018 — particularly the second half, which concentrates on OmniFocus — and listen to a previous episode of the show where Ken Case talks about the roadmap, and listen to another previous special episode where we talk about OmniFocus 3 and tags.

Also see the OmniFocus 3 development blog, which is just starting up (at this writing) and will have more details as we post more.

Aaron Bendickson — system administrator, saint — talks about how he runs things at Omni and, especially, about how he fixes things.

Aaron’s just a small town boy from Missoula who went big: he studied at Berklee College of Music and eventually made his way to Seattle by way of Tacoma. When he’s not fixing Omni things, he’s bicycling, competing in pinball matches, and being a dad.

You can find Aaron @benaar on Twitter and on Instagram.

Some other people, places, and things mentioned:

Dave Messent, OmniFocus product manager, and Tim Ekl, OmniFocus engineer, join the show for a special episode to talk about OmniFocus 3 (for Mac and iOS) and tags.

In the new OmniFocus, tags replace contexts. Tags can do everything contexts can do, and more — you can apply multiple tags to tasks and projects, where with contexts you could apply just one.

Dave and Tim go into detail on how this all works, and they discuss some of the organization and workflows that tags enable.

You can find Dave @dmessent on Twitter, and you can find Tim on Twitter @timothyekl and on the web

For more about tags, you read the Omni Roadmap 2018 — particularly the second half, which concentrates on OmniFocus — and listen to a previous episode of the show where Ken Case talks about the roadmap.

Also see the OmniFocus 3 development blog, which is just starting up (at this writing) and will have more details as we post more.