Thursday, January 26, 2017

Omni’s 2017 Plans

Ken Case:

We’ll be continuing the process of switching to free downloads across all our apps on Mac and iOS. Beyond the benefits we’ve already delivered (upgrade discounts, free upgrades for recent purchases, and free trials), this will make it possible for us to offer enterprise licensing for our iOS apps with support for volume discounts.

[…]

This summer, OmniFocus will be ten years old. We’ve improved a lot of things about the app over those ten years, but to maintain file format compatibility there are some things about the way we work with the app that haven’t ever changed. Last year we laid the groundwork for finally changing some of those, when we switched to a new, extensible file format and added encryption. This year, we’re going to make some fundamental improvements to the data OmniFocus keeps track of.

[…]

In 2016 we scratched the surface with URL automation on iOS, but in 2017 we plan to roll out user automation on iOS in a big way across all our apps with a much richer set of capabilities. This automation support won’t be limited to a simple set of URL primitives; instead, we’re adding support for running JavaScript code: code that has the same level of deep support for manipulating the data in our apps as we’ve previously exposed to AppleScript.

As with Core Data and cloud storage, they’re not waiting for Apple to provide the services that they want for their iOS apps.

Update (2017-02-20): See also: Omni Automation.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

URL "automation" schemes are dangly nuggets from the devil's own arsecrack.

For that one sin alone, the entire iOS dev team should be required to write out RFC2616 one million times, submitting each copy to an Enterprise SOAP service that vomits back an incomprehensible 500,000-line C#/Java stack trace for as long as so much as a comma is out of place.

[…] Previously: Thank You, Sal, Omni’s 2017 Plans. […]

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