Didn’t Omni lay off a bunch of people relatively recently? That doesn’t make me think they’re likely to be fixing long-outstanding problems.
OMG! I didn´t know about this detail. Indeed, I think it really is going to be difficult to implement all those changes in this last quarter of 2020.
Listen to the latest Omnigroup podcast where Ken Case discusses the latest news regarding Omnigroup…
They had to shut down the office and learned to work from home. Their marketing department and kitchen staff was let go. A few programmers left of their own volition to new adventures. But they’ve been churning away. The podcast has resumed with Andrew Mason at the helm.
I don’t think any company has escaped unscathed from COVID-19. We’re seeing store closures or company re-organizations everywhere. I think Omni is adjusting to a new normal.
The latest podcast and the July 2020 Roadmap did talk about what to expect in the near future.
Scroll down to the Omni Roadmap 2020 - July update to see more info. Listen to the podcast episode to hear it directly from the horse’s mouth.
If you read carefully, you might notice that while collaboration features in OF are currently on the roadmap for the rest of 2020, that blog also states that the rethink of the UX was on the map for 2020. Considering this has been an issue for over two years, I wouldn’t hold my breath on seeing any action on this for quite some time.
And when it does come, I will bet you the exorbitant cost of running OF on multiple devices that it’s going to require ponying up for a new version.
Roadmaps are always subject to change. This is very true whenever Apple surprises app developers with updates for MacOS, iOS, and iPadOS. Customers expect their favorite apps to be immediately updated on day one to take advantage of new APIs and OS features.
We’ve all been on road trips where we had a general schedule but something derails us for a day or two - someone in the family gets sick, a flat tire, a delayed airplane flight, a pandemic.
Do we expect and hope to have our feature requests developed already… Yeah… Do we always get them? No. At least not on our personal expectations and time schedules.
But we do see a lot of changes being made… Recent news of task sharing has now expanded to included project sharing for those of us who want collaborative features has us eagerly awaiting. OmniFocus for Web will finally get custom perspectives. Floating time zones have satisfied many of us who travel frequently. Mouse/trackpad support on iPadOS has many of us iPad users feeling elated. These are just some of the features that have added value for many of us. Action Groups and other UX improvements will be something we’re all looking for.
There will always be upgrade discounts for current users as well as free upgrades for customers who bought an app within a recent time window. Then there are users who decide to just go the subscription route if they want to use it for just a few months. OmniGroup has been working hard to bring us value.
YMMV
I appreciate your view, but I’d like to take issue with “OmniGroup has been working hard to bring us value.” It occurred to me yesterday that I might be better served by rolling back to OmniFocus 2 on my iPad, because I believe that the organization of my tasks should follow the structure of my projects, and you just can’t build large engineering structures without hierarchy. I’ve run a consulting business for twenty years, and I depend on being able to organize my tasks efficiently.
OmniFocus for the Web does not offer any value to me — I have OF on the devices that I use constantly (and I paid a lot for that privilege). I take that back… it appears that OF for the web is the best way for me to view projects with action groups on my iPad. Unfortunately, entering data and making changes to tasks is still brutally inefficient. That means that in terms of helping me to actually get things done, the resources put into OF Web offer less than no value. Those decisions are apparently putting off the time when OF becomes usable for me again.
Interestingly, while reading your post, it occurred to me that I might actually have a use for the OF sharing features. It’s possible that I might be able to use that to bridge the gap between my NASA laptop, where I use OmniPlan for, like I said already, complex project management and my personal OF setup. That would maybe put me back in the realm of using OF for Mac again. Of course, I’m not holding my breath that the vaunted new OmniPlan/OmniFocus integration will work with shared projects, so it’s probably a two steps forward, one steps back thing.
I think it’s great that you think Omni is offering a good value. I do not. In fact, I find that the value of this application for my use has actually decreased over time, while the prices go up and Omni continues to insist that new, useful features are on the horizon. Also, while my particular use case — complex projects and the need to do metrics; one of my primary work devices is relatively locked down, so my task management falls on mobile devices; an extensive database of tasks, some of which are years old (for good reason, those are projects which have been processed to a certain point then put on hold) — may be somewhat unique, I think it’s always an issue when a software developer regresses functionality. This is a forum for discussion about OmniFocus, and a lot of the people here tend to be power users. Aren’t those exactly the people who are most likely to be impacted by feature rollbacks? Why is there a problem with calling this out?
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As I said, YMMV.
Life is all about changes. If a product no longer offers value, switch.
I know there will come a time when I retire and I will no longer need the feature set of OmniFocus. I can revert back to Apple Reminders if needed. I can discontinue my Creative Cloud subscription because I no longer need the tools. I won’t need to visit various Discourse forums, sub-Reddit threads, and any other discussion groups to procure new ideas and learn about new feature sets. That’s life…
It happens. I remembered when Final Cut Pro X was first released and it didn’t have a quarter of the feature set that Final Cut Pro 7 had. It took time but Apple had to tear down the infrastructure back to its foundation and build up the feature set from there. Pixelmator was a good app. When Pixelmator Pro came, it lost a lot of features but they are slowly being built back up.
YMMV.
I would argue that Automation is a big and fundamental leap forward. I would also argue that exposing the innards of an app as an API is a huge effort.
Cosmetics might be where people notice change but plumbing has been, rightly, prioritised.
Product Management requires making difficult decisions about priorities.
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