They can’t partially use it and then go up to their desktop later. If we left out some piece, like, say, cost accounting, then people who are trying to do cost accounting will be stuck, and they can’t do it at all anymore. With OmniPlan, you’re talking about an audience of project managers who really need to have all the same project details they’re used to typically. Ken: I think we were able to get a lot of the info in we wanted – it was a little bit harder, this was a specific challenge to OmniPlan – with OmniGraffle or OmniFocus it was easier to find parts of the application you could live without on the iPad on Day 1 or maybe forever, and just leave that out altogether and maybe bring back in later or maybe not, but you have a useable, cohesive, coherent application you can sit down and work with. Do you think that also applies to OmniPlan, were you able to fit as much in without sacrificing the usability? But there isn’t – there aren’t any big features like the forecast and review modes we added to OmniFocus on the iPad where we could say “Oh no, now you can use the app in a whole other way that you couldn’t use it before”ĭon: I read on your blog around the release of OmniOutliner for iPad that you wanted to offer 90% of the functionality that people wanted with about 10% of the effort. The biggest benefit of OmniPlan on the iPad is that it’s mobile, so you can bring it around with you and have it everywhere. Ken: There is, but not quite as strongly as there was with OmniFocus. Is there anything in OmniPlan you guys feel is better suited for the iPad?
#Using omniplan and omnifocus mac#
Screen real-estate is a real challenge.ĭon: Now when you guys released OmniFocus for the iPad, there were some things that a lot people thought the iPad did better than the Mac version. I’m not saying we’re going to be giving up the outline, we’re not done yet, that’s the struggle we’re trying to work with and maybe the real ultimate answer is to flip back and forth between the two but there’s definitely not room to have both at the same time. If we’re only using the GANTT chart, we want to be adding subtasks – be able to show containment of subtasks under the parent task right there in that live timeline. If you wanted to have a task and break it down into subtasks, on the Mac we’d have you go over to the outline and create new rows and indent them underneaths as they were subtasks. So we decided that the most relevant part of using OmniPlan is not the outline which may be of interest for structuring your plan data, but what people are most interested in is the GANTT chart timeline so, for Omniplan for the iPad we just focused on that being the entire contents of the screen and working with that and trying to create the content in the visual timeline in ways we would normally rely on the outline for doing. We faced this challenge even more so in OmniPlan for iPad because OmniPlan typically uses more screen real-estate due to its task outline on the left and the large visual GANTT chart timeline on the right. So starting with OmniGraffle we had to re-picture what is the focus of the activity and how can we get rid of the physical controls without burying them so deep that they are no longer accessible. When we watched people try to struggle through using some of our apps on the nice new MacBook Airs like the ones we’re starting to use here we found it just felt too cramped.
We had already started noticing that some of our apps were starting to feel a bit squished on laptops – we have typically designed them to work with large desktop displays.
Ken: One of the challenges we have had with all of our apps is that the Mac has more screen real-estate available, or at least the design we have used for our apps use a lot more screen real-estate than we have available on the iPad.
#Using omniplan and omnifocus for mac#
We also had some time to talk about potential updates to other Omni products, as well as projects Ken would like to work on, given more time and resources.ĭon: First off, what where some of the challenges you had porting the OmniPlan for Mac experience to the iPad? I had the pleasure of enjoying a casual talk with The Omni Group CEO Ken Case and took the opportunity to ask him some questions on their upcoming release, OmniPlan for iPad.