The Omni Group has been a major player in the productivity market on Mac for many years, and even made a launch-day move on the iPhone App Store in 2008 with its award-winning OmniFocus task management app. But for Apple's next portable device, Omni has even grander plans: the company announced in January that it will bring all five of its core productivity and design apps--OmniGraffle, OmniPlan, OmniOutliner, OmniGraphSketcher, and the aforementioned OmniFocus--to the iPad in 2010.
"In Production" Screenshot. Final UI May Change
With two of those apps (OmniGraffle and OmniGraphSketcher) hoping to be available soon after the iPad launch, we spoke with Omni Group founder and CEO Ken Case earlier this month to find out how the company has approached development on the iPad.
"The thing that really made us want to jump on it right away is the opportunity to start thinking about how our applications should interact on a multitouch computing device. This is the first device that I think really is well suited to having something like OmniGraffle be on it in a multitouch form," explains Case. "It's not the first device of this sort--obviously, the iPhone and iPod Touch have been around for a few years--but those didn't really have enough screen real estate to really make sense to do a diagramming application on it of this sort."
"In Production" Screenshot. Final UI May Change
Case sees multitouch devices as the future of computing as a whole, and says the company wanted to "get its feet wet" with the iPad and thinking of ways to adapt its programs to this emerging environment. Moreover, he sees the iPad as much more of a collaborative device than a laptop, opening the doors for multiple users to interact with greater flexibility. "These productivity applications are particularly well-suited to bringing over to a mobile device that you can bring into a coffee shop and work with somebody across the table," he asserts. "They can see the same thing you're looking at sitting on the table in front of you, and you can sit here and manipulate the wire-frames you're mocking up (or whatever)."
As it did when it brought OmniFocus to the iPhone, The Omni Group is trying to distill each of its applications to its primary functions and needs on the path to the iPad, as to present the best experience within the unique features (and limitations) of the tablet. "We're trying to get to what the core of our applications are about, and then we're rethinking how we present that core functionality on this entirely new device," says Case. "So we tend not to think about it as things that we're changing about the application, but rather about what it is that is essential to this application."
In the case of OmniGraffle and OmniGraphSketcher, you can see from the non-final, work-in-progress iPad simulator screens that Omni is attempting to maintain what makes each Mac app so useful and compelling, while designing the user interface to take advantage of the iPad's myriad features and additions (such as the popover menus). Initially, Case says the team tried to embrace complex actions, even developing an entire set of unique gestures for its apps, but ultimately ceded to simplicity and the desire to make its applications both powerful and approachable.
"Our first inclination was that we thought we'd try to get rid of all the modes we have in our applications, like the drawing mode in OmniGraffle, versus the painting mode or maybe a navigating mode. And as we started going down that path we realized that it led to a lot of different gestures that you'd have to do to accomplish the different tasks that you want," admits Case. "When we thought about it, we realized we didn't want people to have to learn an all-new gestural language for a device that's supposed to be this simple. What we really want is for people to be able to use it with just a single finger, and then have these gestures be ways that they could be more efficient about it, but [still] have everything be discoverable and usable with just a single finger and the familiar gestures they already know from using an iPhone."
"In Production" Screenshot. Final UI May Change
As a result, Case says the team hasn't focused so much on bringing new features to the iPad versions of these apps, but rather refining the user interface and commands to promote simplicity and ease of use. However, having a portable device like the iPad in the mix has prompted Omni to consider some of the ways these new apps might interact with their Mac counterparts. "We are looking at things like sharing and syncing, as those seem like really important components of a mobile device," he says. "Being able to share your documents and synchronize them with other copies, or back to the Macintosh desktop--those are some new areas for us."
With Case keen on the future of multitouch computing and company readying all five of its primary productivity apps for the iPad, it's clear that The Omni Group expects big things from the device--so much so that Case believes these portable iterations could become Omni's top products in the future. "I think the potential is there--over the next five years, I would expect the iPad apps to be outselling the Macintosh apps," claims Case. "At the moment, our iPhone app version of OmniFocus is outselling the Mac version, so it's already happened with at least one of our apps. I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen with these others as well."
