Ken: No I had plenty of people bugging me. And I know Brian and the other managers were bugging Ken about this periodically.īrent: Ken were you also bugging yourself about it periodically? I would get notifications, probably… I want to say every day, but it was probably every other day. You know, “when are we gonna do OmniFocus for the Web?” It's one of my saved bug searches. And so when I became manager I periodically would bug Ken about this in our one-on-ones. Grayson: So this product is the most requested bug in our bug data base. What got us to reboot this project? Grayson, what did you do to make this happen again? Grayson: Then we got more excited about something else.īrent: So that was 2009 era. Ken: That was not where we ended up going. Ken: Yeah we were very excited by some of the navigation things that we had come up with. I'm almost done! Look!” And then that's when things get tough. If you're like me you think to yourself, “Wow. It started slowing down after the initial fast progress.īrent: It's always fun to get that first prototype. Then we ended up sort of extending it and trying to… fixing bugs with it. But we were pushing the edges of what it supported at that time. after evaluating several different options we ended up going with Cappuccino. We had prototypes working with drag and drop and all sorts of stuff going on. Had we gotten as far as prototypes? Was the thing working at all? well, a lot of the attention at that time. It's an old blog post, even.īrent: So iPad got all.
Both some of the big Mac updates that we were working on and of course, this project.īrent: I remember famously Omni said iPad or Bust! Exclamation mark. So we put a lot of projects on hold for that. And we decided we were going to bring all of our apps to the iPad. So this was the shortly afterward.īut the big interruption came the next year, in 2010 when, in January, Apple announced the iPad. Of course, 2008 was the year the App Store became available on the iPhone. Ken: So if we started this nine years ago, why has it taken so long to get there? So I mentioned that we started this as we were also working on OmniFocus 2. It's just the open source project that's continued on.īrent: Who was the engineer that we hired? Was that Andrew Burkhalter?īrent: Okay, and he's still here, working on OmniFocus. Ken: And I believe they're approaching 1.0 right now, actually - this month, so.īrent: Amazing, I thought I heard those guys went to Apple. It had all these sorts of things that a native app would have. Ken: Yeah it was written in a language called Objective-J, and it tried to make everything work exactly like it would work in a Cocoa app. Cappuccino was the one that looked like Objective-C, right? We started evaluting the various technologies that were available to us at that time like Cappuccino and SproutCore.īrent: I remember those well.
So we started building OmniFocus for the Web in 2009, hired a full time web developer to come on board the project with us. And so they were looking for something else. So shortly after we shipped OmniFocus 1 we started hearing a lot from customers that were using OmniFocus and trying to use it at work, but they weren't necessarily able to bring their Mac to work. Ken: We started OmniFocus for the Web about the same time as we started working on OmniFocus 2, actually. I assume then it was all Flash and ActionScript. Ken, tell us about the early days of OmniFocus for the Web. It turns out that this project started nine years ago. In the studio with me today is Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group. In fact, we're probably still building it, but we'll go into how we did it. We're talking about how we built OmniFocus for the Web. Muuusic.īrent: I'm your host, Brent Simmons, and this is a special episode.
Get to know the people and stories behind The Omni Group's award winning productivity apps for Mac and iOS. Brent Simmons: You're listening to The Omni Show.