Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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...
Oct 09, 2019•28 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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. Y...
Sep 25, 2019•29 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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 wo...
Sep 11, 2019•25 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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...
Aug 28, 2019•31 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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 e...
Jul 31, 2019•34 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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, attendin...
Jun 26, 2019•34 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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 ...
Jun 12, 2019•29 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.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 chance...
May 29, 2019•32 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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...
May 15, 2019•28 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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 ....
May 01, 2019•25 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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...
Apr 17, 2019•48 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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 Anne...
Apr 03, 2019•35 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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. The Story of OmniPlan 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...
Mar 20, 2019•29 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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. T...
Mar 06, 2019•24 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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 softwar...
Feb 20, 2019•24 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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 . W...
Feb 06, 2019•33 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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 c...
Jan 23, 2019•31 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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! Some other pe...
Jan 09, 2019•23 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com For our holiday episode we’re joined by Tim Wood, founder and CTO of The Omni Group. Tim talks about serving as a resource, educator, and toolmaker for our dozen-ish engineers. Tim also talks about Omni’s frameworks, saving the Mac world from Y2K, soccer fandom, and pottery. You can find Tim on Twitter @tjw . Note: we’re taking a little break after this episode. The next one is scheduled for January 9. Happy holidays! Some other people,...
Dec 12, 2018•28 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Molly Reed, COO — who is, in an alternate universe, your favorite coloratura soprano — joins the show to talk about starting at The Omni Group in her early 20s and helping it thrive in the years since. She also talks about socks and sandals (don’t do it), solving problems, opera training, being a woman in tech — and about the beguiling Cleopatra the cat . Molly provides this video of Cleo totally trolling Mara the dog . Some other peopl...
Nov 28, 2018•31 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com This episode was recorded at the Swift by Northwest conference in Portland, on October 19, 2018. It’s a panel discussion with people from outside Omni, and we’re stretching a bit from our usual content — but we think you’ll enjoy it anyway! Before the panel, your host Brent Simmons emailed the panelists to ask them about things that provoked strong feelings — positive or negative or both — to use as topics. These did not have to be stri...
Nov 14, 2018•52 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com For this special episode we’re joined by Ken Case, CEO; Grayson West, Design Manager; Chris Pruitt, Web Developer; and Mike Davies, Devops Engineer and Guru. We talk about the nine-year-long history of OmniFocus for the Web and how we’re building it. Issues include front-end design, encryption and security, running Objective-C and Swift code on our servers, and writing portions in Python and in React. This show will answer the question,...
Oct 31, 2018•28 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Rey Worthington — software developer, rock climber, cat enjoyer — talks about bringing Mojave Dark Mode support to OmniGraffle and OmniPlan . She also talks about how to make NSPredicateEditor look right on a sheet. And about growing up in the “Texas of California,” going to school at University of Pacific, and making her way to The Omni Group via meeting the folks at their Macworld Expo booth. Then we talk about climbing, and about (mo...
Oct 17, 2018•37 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Michelle Knee — tester, game player, wrangler of ragdoll cats — talks about testing all of Omni’s many websites, including OmniFocus for the Web. Michelle also talks about the special challenges in testing websites: defeating browser caching, the problem children (iPhone SE and iPhone 8 Plus), responsive design mode bugs, and testing on multiple operating systems. Then we talk about games. And Hawaii. And mystery knit-alongs. And — most...
Oct 03, 2018•31 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group, Dave Messent, OmniFocus Product Manager, and Joel Page, User Experience Designer, join the show for a special episode to celebrate the launch of OmniFocus 3 for Mac and to talk about its new design. The early OmniFocus 3 for Mac designs are kind of like a concept car — futuristic, interesting, beautiful, but not necessarily something you could actually drive. We talk about going from those early designs ...
Sep 24, 2018•26 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Grayson West — who just might be a superhero (you can tell by the name) — manages design, the website, and marketing at Omni from his headquarters on the fourth floor, high above Lake Union . Grayson started as a graphic designer at Omni 15 years ago and moved into management four years ago. In his youth he was an international bicycle racer, and lately he’s become a CrossFit trainer and kiteboarder . And — most importantly! — he’s a ca...
Sep 05, 2018•32 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group, and Dave Messent, OmniFocus product manager, join the show for a special episode to talk about OmniFocus 3 for Mac and how it’s gaining new features that first appeared in OmniFocus 3 for iOS. Some of these new features include tags, fancy repeating tasks, the Forecast tag, and enhanced custom perspectives. We also talk about features that were not brought over to the Mac — since they were already there....
Aug 22, 2018•21 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com Like any other workplace, Omni has a few subcultures — knitters, rock climbers, dog fanciers — but none of them involve quite as much rum, kitsch, and straight-up chillin’ as Tiki. Mark Boszko, Aaron Cherof, and Evan McNulty — roughly half of Omni Team Tiki — talk about their zest for fruity drinks and for the whole surrounding show. We talk about the décor from a lost world that never existed anyway. We talk about the fancy and sometim...
Aug 08, 2018•39 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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 Seat...
Jul 25, 2018•26 min
Full transcript and show notes at theomnishow.omnigroup.com 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: University District Wil Shipley OmniGraphSketcher Nisqually...
Jul 11, 2018•25 min
