KenCase
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Dear Aunt TUAW: ZDnet switcher has some wires crossed
Auntie knows that some of her correspondents don't get around to sending in their questions promptly -- in some cases, not at all. This week, she's handed over the perfumed stationery to nephew TJ, who has a bit of a bee in his bonnet over Ken Hess's account of his first week with the Mac, published last week by ZDnet. Dear Ken, After your rather colorful piece about wanting to trade in your iPhone 5 for an iPhone 4, I was curious to read your account of switching to the Mac. The challenges you're facing are surmountable; I believe I may be able to give you a few pointers to make the transition smoother. I went through this exact process about 10 years ago, and I've never looked back. While things may feel easier on Windows, as someone who spent time and has done tech support on both platforms, I think it's fair to say that really depends a lot on what you are used to. For example, when I bought my PowerBook, I hooked the Ethernet cable to it. Then I started searching for the equivalent of Windows' "Network Wizard" to start configuring -- whether or not this was a public network, a home network, or a work network. After several minutes of searching I finally gave up and thought, "Wait, you don't suppose that it's just that easy? I plugged in the network cable and I'm on the network?" But that's how it worked. Click to close ... when it makes sense. You wrote: "[W]hen I click the X on an application, I expect it to exit." At the risk of frustrating you further, some apps on the Mac do close when you close their window, and some don't. For example, if you close the "Contacts.app" window, there is really nothing more for you to do with that app, so the app closes. However, if you are in a word processing or text editor and close the last window, maybe you want to create a new document. If you close the last window of your web browser, maybe you want to go somewhere else. But here's the thing: the way that Windows does it isn't better, necessarily; it's that it's familiar. If you want to quit an app on Mac, just quit the app using the File menu's Quit command, or the handy Command-Q keyboard shortcut. (Yes, you can control the Mac using the keyboard.) Most apps will resume right where you left off, including re-opening windows just like you had them before. If you don't want an app to save its windows, you can even tell it not to. Aside: Force quitting iOS apps You also wrote: "A similar thing happens on the iPad and iPhone. My daughter never quits any apps, so she always has twenty or more 'minimized' apps on her devices. Of course, everyone in my family also makes fun of me because I want them to close the doors when entering or leaving the house. I must be the one that's wrong. I like to close doors and apps. Deal with it." You are, of course, welcome to use your devices however you like. However, your analogy to closing doors when entering or leaving the house doesn't really fit, because background apps on iOS will automatically quit when the OS needs to reclaim the memory they're using. Force-quitting apps on iOS is like standing at one of those automatic doors at the grocery store and pulling it shut behind you. You can do it if you want, but don't expect other shoppers to compliment you for your diligence. When you re-launch an iOS app, it will pick up where you left off, so it appears as if you never quit it at all. (Sounds familiar? Apple is trying to introduce that convenience into Mac OS X too.) Free and Bundled Apps You wrote: "If you haven't noticed, I really like free applications." That was a strange thing to say after mentioning, twice, that one of the first things you installed was Microsoft Office, which is probably the most expensive "app" most Mac users will ever install, unless they decide to spend $20 on Pages instead. Fair warning, Pages isn't filled with oodles of overcrowded toolbars reworked into a 'ribbon' either. In fact, the default look of a new document in Microsoft Word compared to the default look of a new document in Pages.app may be a good illustration of the difference in mindset between the two platforms -- Word first: vs. Pages: That's after Microsoft updated Word with the "ribbon" feature to "simplify" it. Now, is one of those better than the other? No, they're just different approaches. Personally, I prefer Pages because it shows me a small subset of commonly needed features, whereas Microsoft Word looks like a bad case of UI overreach. Let's move on. The next concern you raised was about the perceived lack of bundled apps on OS X: "At the price that Apple charges ($800), you'd think I'd get a free copy of PhotoShop Lite or some other 'lite' versions of something with it but, no, it's pretty bare bones." First, "the price that Apple charges" for its operating system is $20. The rest is for the hardware. Microsoft doesn't bundle third-party apps with its operating system, either -- that's down to the PC manufacturers. Second: Really? You're complaining that Mac OS X doesn't come loaded down with the free applications and utilities commonly derided by Windows users as "crapware?" You may have noticed that there is no Mac version of PC Decrapifier, either. This is generally considered to be a feature of buying a Mac -- not a flaw. Instead, Apple has created the Mac App Store, which is conveniently bundled with OS X and accessible at all times, via the "Apple Menu" as shown here: Fire that up and you will find more apps that you could ever hope to use. Many of them are free, and those that aren't free are generally pretty inexpensive. When you buy from the Mac App Store, you also know that the app developer has met Apple's standards for inclusion in the store, so it won't muck up your computer. (The question of whether those restrictions, particularly the "sandboxing" rules that control which areas of your Mac an app can access, are overly restrictive is a question for another post.) Oh, and there are no license codes for apps from the Mac App Store, and you can use them on all of your Macs. In fact, you can also set it up so that whenever you download an app from the Mac App Store, that newly-purchased app will automatically be downloaded and installed on all of your other Macs. On paying for software I find it disheartening to hear a tech writer claim that he doesn't have any money to spend on software. (Even more so when that tech writer is "a full-time Windows and Linux system administrator with 20 years of experience with Mac, Linux, UNIX, and Windows systems in large multi-data center environments," as your ZDnet bio states. Sysadmin wages are, by and large, better than writer's pay.) I assume that you get paid for your work, and that you pay your mechanic, accountant, and doctor for their work, not to mention either mortgage or rent. I'm not sure how you expect software developers to pay their mortgage or rent or their mechanic, account or doctor if they aren't getting paid for their work. But that's a whole other conversation. Crashing You wrote "Pinta, for example, won't allow me to cut or copy a bit of a drawing. I get an exception when I try. That's a significant fail for that product." Wow. You ran into a bug in a free, cross-platform image program? I'm shöcked. (By the way, we call that a Sarcastic Umlaut.) I'm not sure what this has to do with a review of your purchase of a Mac. "I get some app crashes -- far more than I should for a brand new system. So far, the App Store app has crashed multiple times, Pinta has crashed, and a few others that I can't recall have crashed on me." Seems like you've run into more crashes on your new Mac than I have on all of my Macs in the past 6 months or more. In fact, I purchased that exact same Mac mini about 2 months ago and I'm not sure I've seen any crashes on it, and certainly haven't seen any crashes of apps from Apple. Do third-party apps sometimes crash on Mac OS X? Sure. Do Apple's own apps sometimes crash too? Sure. Does that happen on Windows too? Yup. Desktop Publishing You wrote: "I've always wanted a Mac for Desktop Publishing, for Graphics creation and editing, and for movie editing. All those things are now available for Windows and I'm not convined [sic] that the Mac versions are any better these days. Twenty years ago, they were. Today, not so much." As someone who has used Microsoft Word and Pages extensively, I can tell you that doing consumer-level desktop publishing in Pages is much easier than it is in Word. Have you actually tried any Mac graphics programs? I don't mean "Mac versions of Windows programs" or "free app that tries to work on Windows, Linux, and Mac," I mean actually developed-for-the-Mac applications like Graphic Converter or Pixelmator? Because it sounds like you've tried a bunch of Windows-based or Windows-centric apps on Mac and then declared that a Mac is no better than a Windows machine. That would be like me switching to Windows and complaining that iTunes and Safari aren't any better than on the Mac (which they're not, but it's hardly a fair assessment of the whole platform). The menu bar is better. No, really. It is. You wrote: "That weird application bar thing at the top is application focused." It's called the "menu bar." Not to put too fine a point on it, but maybe it'd be worth taking an hour or two to learn the Mac-specific terminology before declaring yourself ready to write an post for a major tech website dismissing an entire mainstream operating system that you have used for "a full week." [This is a strong real-world example of Michael Chastain's legendary General Motors Help Line joke. "Motor? Engine? I don't want to learn technical terms, I just want to go places in my car!"--Ed.] The menu bar is better. It works consistently across all applications. No longer will you have to blindly click around some application to try to figure out where the menus are. They are at the top. Always. Yes, if you find yourself clicking randomly around the OS (any OS) then you might get unexpected results. The difference is that OS X offers you consistency. In sum ... You started off by saying that you had been using Mac OS X for "a full week." I expected you meant that you were just getting started -- after all, you've been using other operating systems for decades -- but you seem to have already given up. Of course Mac OS X seems strange; it's different from what you are used to! There is still a lot out there to discover, such as the fact that you can get free screen recording built-in using QuickTime X (as pointed out by our own Megan Lavey-Heaton). Is it as good as Camtasia? No, but it's free. And if you want Camtastia, it's available for Mac (for a price), along with Jing and other products from TechSmith at several price points. There's also iShowU and ScreenFlow and probably some others that I'm forgetting. If you're seeking software tools and Google doesn't turn up what you are looking for, there's always Alternative.To. As a new Mac user you might also greatly benefit from checking out AskDifferent, Mac OS X Hints, and our own Mac 101 series. Of course, mainstream social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Google+ are good places to seek out help; so are Apple's own support forums. Even the most experienced Mac users were beginners once. Unlike the bad days of the 1990s, however, now you've got a lot of company; reach out, ask for help, get what you need and enjoy. But maybe the first step towards the comfort zone is learning -- and accepting -- that you don't know what you don't know. Anyway, we're here to help. Good luck with week two of your Mac experience... and beyond.
OmniGroup releases OmniPresence, free sync technology for OS X and iOS
OmniGroup, the Seattle-based developers of OmniOutliner, OmniGraphSketcher, OmniGraffle, OmniFocus and OmniPlan, has announced that today they are shipping OmniPresence document syncing. OmniPresence rounds out the automatic syncing solutions that OmniGroup added first to OmniFocus in 2008 and OmniPlan in 2011. OmniGroup CEO Ken Case noted in a May 20 blog post that OmniPresence works well with Mac apps that support OS X Auto Save and Versions. To quote Case, "Using the same underlying document coordination as Versions, OmniPresence lets your app know when a document has been changed on another device, and double-checks to make sure it always syncs a current and complete copy of any documents currently being edited. OmniPresence can't prevent conflicting edits from multiple devices, but when that happens it automatically saves both versions of conflicting edits so that no edits are lost." OmniPresence is built on top of open web server technologies, which means that users can sync document using their own web server. Apache server, for example, is built into Mountain Lion Server, so any user or company can keep OmniPresence syncing running well into the future. Since many customers will choose not to set up their own servers, OmniGroup is scaling up their Omni Sync Server to support OmniPresence. Anyone who previously checked the "I am brave" box on sync.omnigroup.com should already have access. Developers will be able to see the source code to OmniPresence on github. A demo video of OmniPresence in action is embedded below. Show full PR text The Omni Group Releases OmniPresence: Free Sync Technology for OS X and iOS Customers now able to quickly and privately sync documents across multiple devices SEATTLE, Washington-May 23, 2013-The Omni Group, developer of productivity applications for Mac, iPad and iPhone, today announced the release of OmniPresence, a new way for users to sync documents. This completes the effort to bring full synchronization to each of the Omni Group's five applications. At the core of OmniPresence are open, free and tested technologies, chosen specifically so users can store their data anywhere. This is an approach vastly different from the proprietary - and sometimes short-lived - sync services on the market today. Put simply, OmniPresence syncs everything within a folder between many devices using a standard web server. Because of the way OmniPresence was designed, customers also have the advantage of being able to keep all data under their own control. This is sometimes a necessity for confidential data within companies. "OmniPresence is built to last," says Ken Case, CEO of the Omni Group. "Rather than building document syncing on top of a proprietary service that might not be available to you in five years, we built OmniPresence on top of open server technologies so that anyone can run their own service. If you're headed to Mars or Antarctica and want to be able to sync documents between devices while you're there, all you need is a run-of-the-mill server and OmniPresence." If customers aren't interested in self-hosting, many free web hosting providers offer the necessary support to get started. The Omni Group today also released a free and open-source framework for iOS developers to add support for OmniPresence to any document-based application on the iPad or iPhone. OmniPresence is a free download for the latest version of OS X, and is built into each of the Omni Group's document-based apps on the iPad: OmniGraffle, OmniOutliner and OmniGraphSketcher. These apps join OmniFocus and OmniPlan, bringing syncing to the Omni Group's entire family of products. ### About OmniPresence: OmniPresence brings syncing to the Omni Group's document-based applications for Mac and iPad. Built to last, it was designed with the user's privacy - and the data's portability - in mind. About The Omni Group: Founded in 1993 as a software consultancy and one of the first companies dedicated to developing software for OS X, the Omni Group is focused on making productivity software enjoyable to use. The employee-owned company is happy to call beautiful Seattle, Washington home.
Omni Group's Ken Case on OmniFocus 2 and the origins of the app
One of the true joys of attending Macworld is getting to talk to some of the best developers in the world. Among the best of the best in the Apple world is Ken Case, CEO of The Omni Group. Today the company officially announced OmniFocus 2, the next generation of its flagship task management / GTD (Getting Things Done) app. On Thursday, I had the opportunity to sit down with Ken to discuss the upgraded app and see it in action. I was interested in finding out more about the history of OmniFocus, and Ken noted that the app was an outgrowth of users with OmniOutliner using it with a set of AppleScripts called "Kinkless GTD" by Ethan Schoonover. It made a rather good GTD tool, and added to Merlin Mann's efforts at proselytizing the Mac community to do GTD, the seeds of OmniFocus were planted. When The Omni Group decided to develop a dedicated GTD app, they invited Merlin and Ethan to come in and talk about their thoughts on what a Mac app should contain. That first meeting expanded into a long series of two-hour conference calls with the pair to iron out the initial generation of the app. As Case noted, the design goal was to "make a GTD app that didn't require a degree to use." OmniFocus 2 is an outgrowth of the highly successful app and the iOS version that came later, building on the power of the initial app and the UI of the iOS version. OmniFocus was a bit too intimidating for new users, and the reinvention of the app for iPad made it simpler tool to use. Some of the new features of OmniFocus 2 include a forecast mode, which gives users an idea of exactly what work is coming up in the near future and a UI that combines all navigation into one sidebar encompassing the project list, context list and the forecast view. Of course, OmniFocus 2 can be synced to iPhone and iPad. The new OmniPresence service will be published as open source, allowing synchronization of documents and data through virtually any WebDAV server. After the debut of OmniFocus 2 last night, Omni Group expects to go into a private test sometime this month with more than 10,000 people already signed up to give the app a try. After the private testing is complete, a "wide open" public test will gather further feedback. As Case mentioned, Omni Group will "ship no app before its time." The app will come in two configurations: a US$39.99 Standard Edition and a $79.99 Pro Edition. The Pro edition adds the option of designing and building custom workflows (available in OmniFocus 1 now), and support Perspectives and AppleScript. For more information, pop on over to Omni Group's blog and read the post from Ken Case unveiling OmniFocus 2 to the world.
The Omni Group's Ken Case talks with TUAW at Macworld iWorld 2012
One of the most innovative and longstanding software development firms in the Apple ecosystem is The Omni Group. The company originally developed software for Steve Jobs's NeXT in the 1990's, created some of the first OS X software in the 2000s, and has gracefully made the transition to iOS with the advent of the iPhone and iPad. On Wednesday, I had the pleasure of talking with Omni Group CEO Ken Case about the company's latest technical achievement -- building Siri capabilities into OmniFocus for iPhone -- and the history of this venerable favorite of Apple fans worldwide. Over the next week or so, TUAW will be posting a number of interviews with both established development firms like The Omni Group and new startups that are just beginning to make their presence known in the Apple world. Be sure to visit often to check out our video offerings. You can check out more of our Macworld|iWorld 2012 coverage here.
OmniFocus for iPhone finally has reminders, but implementation is awful
[Update] Ken Case comments below, addressing some of the concerns listed here. It looks like a future version of OmniFocus on the Mac will be able to directly update the OmniFocus reminders on the server, removing at least one of my complaints. Ken Case from The Omni Group has been twittering for awhile about the impending inclusion of alarm reminders for OmniFocus. The task management app's iPhone users have been pestering The Omni Group to implement reminders as push notifications, but OmniFocus refuses to do so. They say that reminders that rely on connectivity are not good enough, and they have instead chosen to implement reminders by exporting due dates and times into iCal. Once the time comes for a reminder, it pops up like a normal iCal appointment reminder. Well, OmniFocus 1.5.2 for iPhone was released, and now we get to see how this alternative reminder system works. If I had to choose a word to describe this implementation, that word would be "awful." Here's why: The Omni Group has taken great pains to point out that you do not need to be using the desktop version of OmniFocus to get use out of the iPhone version. But for users that only have the iPhone version and are not synchronizing it to either MobileMe (which has a yearly fee) or a WebDAV server (complicated for non-techies), they can't use this implementation of reminders. That's right; the way it works is that OmniFocus on the iPhone exports your reminders to your synchronization server, then points iCal on the iPhone to the server to import your reminders. That means that if you enter new due dates in OmniFocus for iPhone but don't happen to have connectivity, you won't get reminders. Wait, I thought it was implemented this way in the first place to guard against a lack of connectivity? Your OmniFocus reminders unnecessarily pollute your iPhone calendar with reminders. This is a visual problem when you need to glance at your calendars and see what actual appointments are coming up. On the iPhone you can either look at one specific calendar, or all calendars, so if like me you need to regularly stay on top of more than one calendar, you're forced to look at your OmniFocus reminders as well. Oh, and even when you complete them in OmniFocus and resync, they don't go away in your calendar. [Update] Stephen points out in the comments that this works as expected, and upon further testing I have to agree. Maybe I was being a bit too impatient. Since your OmniFocus reminders are actually just fake appointments, there is no way to audibly differentiate them from appointment reminders. They sound and look exactly the same. Remember the Milk, for example, uses push notifications on its iPhone app, and you can set the notification sound to a number of different options. That way you know that you're being reminded of a task rather than an appointment. Reminders are set based on Due time, rather than Available time, and in terms of flexibility you can set the reminder to be 5 to 60 minutes before the task is due. By the time a task is actually due, isn't it too late to be reminded about it? Finally, if you're a user of OmniFocus for the Mac, your reminders are not created on your iPhone until you think to launch OmniFocus on the iPhone and synchronize it. That means that if you work all day in OmniFocus on your Mac (like I do), then drive home and start doing other stuff and don't happen to open OmniFocus on your iPhone, you won't receive any reminders for tasks that you might have set for that night, or until you actually open and sync OmniFocus on your iPhone. So, what would I rather see? Push notifications, like the many other OmniFocus for iPhone users out there that have been providing their feedback to The Omni Group. As mentioned, Remember the Milk has implemented push notifications, and the ability to change the notification sound isn't the only trick it has up its sleeve. The Remember the Milk icon on my iPhone's screen shows how many due tasks I have that day, and the number changes almost instantly when I make changes on the web version. To see how many currently available and due tasks I have in OmniFocus, I again have to launch the app and wait for it to synchronize. While I love OmniFocus and I think The Omni Group does amazing work, this implementation of reminders for the iPhone version of OmniFocus is just full of an amazing amount of fail. It's a hacky workaround that still doesn't ensure that a lack of connectivity won't adversely affect the user's ability to receive reminder notifications. Omni folks, this is just meant to be tough love -- I wouldn't be saying all of this if I didn't truly care about OmniFocus.
