OmniOutliner 6.1
Redesigning and rebuilding all of our toolbars, sidebars, and inspectors for Liquid Glass gave us a great opportunity to cross-pollinate features, making some familiar platform-exclusive features available across all platforms for the first time. And it was also easier than ever to build new features that work in consistent ways across those platforms.
For all platforms OmniOutliner 6 introduces smart Dynamic Themes, which automatically adapt to Light and Dark Mode, and a brand new cross-platform template picker.
On the Mac, OmniOutliner 6 additionally introduces the ability to open and work with concurrent multiple windows of the same document—something I find particularly useful when working with long outlines.
On the iPad and iPhone, OmniOutliner 6 adds support for creating and editing advanced Saved Filters, and a handy, new Style Attributes Inspector, plus additional style customization support for grid lines, row indentation and column-spanning Notes.
Multiple windows per document is probably my favorite new feature. I have some really big outlines that I don’t want to split up, because I like to be able to search everything at once. It had been unwieldy to flip back and forth to look at different parts of the document, so I had been duplicating the file in order to open another (view-only) copy in a separate window. Now I can just open another window—and it even supports more than two. This is also useful if I want to do a search without losing my current view.
Not being able to edit saved filters on iOS was a longstanding limitation. It didn’t affect me that much because I nearly always use OmniOutliner from my Mac. But I imagine this was a more serious problem for heavier iOS users because—at least for me—saved filters aren’t set-it-and-forget-it like smart playlists in Music. My filters often have embedded query text that I want to edit. It’s great that this can be done from iOS now, and it may be the best iOS implementation I’ve seen of this sort of complex interface. Version 6 also lets you duplicate saved filters, which is great when I want to create multiple complex filters that are the same except for one condition.
But, for me, the change is actually a regression because on the Mac the standard predicate editor interface has been replaced with the new cross-platform filter editor interface. On iOS, it’s impressive that editing complex filters is even possible, but on the Mac the new interface—based around nested sheets that lack default buttons—feels clunky. You also can no longer create new criteria at arbitrary locations; instead, they are always created at the bottom, and then you can drag them to the desired location.
I’m also unhappy with the layout of the window toolbar area. The filter field for regular searches has moved from the toolbar to a separate banner that shifts my content down and takes up more space (while wasting space in my now-empty toolbar). I used to put the i button in the toolbar for toggling the inspector pane. In previous versions, the inspector appeared below the toolbar, so I could click twice in the same place to show/hide the inspector. Now, the inspector goes all the way to the top of the window (even though there’s nothing actually in the top portion of it) so that every time I click the toolbar button it moves out from under the cursor. I think Apple is encouraging this sort of design, but I just don’t see the point. (Toggling the inspector via the keyboard also isn’t easy because I type the “I” key using my mouse hand.) On the plus side, you can now save some space at the bottom of the window by hiding the status bar.
But as I mentioned last year, one of the interesting problems we’ve been pondering is how best to link to documents in native apps. We’ve spent some time refining our solution to that problem, Omni Links, which are now shipping first in OmniOutliner 6. With Omni Links, we can link to content across all our devices, and we can share those links with other people and other apps.
Omni Links support everything we said document links needed to have. Omni Links work across all of Apple’s computing platforms and can be shared with a team. They leverage existing solutions for syncing and sharing documents, such as iCloud Drive or shared Git repositories. They are easy to create, easy to use, and easy to share.
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With Omni Links, this makes collaboration easier than ever: you can select a row, copy an Omni Link, and share it with your team—and anyone with a Mac, iPad, iPhone, or Apple Vision Pro can open the link in the free viewer to see what you shared—no additional purchase required.
Omni Links are really cool and seem to have a good, flexible design. As in previous versions, you can make a link, not just to a file, but also to a particular outline row within it. Each row has a unique ID so that the link keeps pointing to the right place even if you move the row or add other rows around it. What’s new with Omni Links is that when you link to another file (rather than create an internal link within the same document) the links are more robust and sharable (either to other people or to your other devices). Each link consists of a connected folder name and a relative path. Having a floating base for the path solves the problem of each user/device having a different absolute path for iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Git, or wherever else you store your documents. You wouldn’t want to move or rename the file within the folder (as that would change the relative path), but you can change where the folder itself is stored (or even which service is used to sync it) without breaking any document links. You can just go to the Connected Folders window in OmniOutliner and tell it where that folder is now stored. The links are also scriptable via Omni Automation.
With OmniOutliner, these powerful Apple Intelligence language models are fully under your control. Like all language models, they’re not perfect oracles by any means—and they’re not fundamental to using OmniOutliner. But sample plug-ins leveraging Apple Intelligence are ready for immediate one-click installation, and plug-in authors can integrate these language models with OmniOutliner in all sorts of creative ways.
For those who choose to use them, these plug-ins can be nice time savers: automatically summarizing an article into an outline, or generating content such as a meeting agenda or a fictional story based on a simple prompt.
The integration between Omni Automation and Apple’s foundation models is really neat. Everything happens on-device, and it’s able to take input from the current outline selection, the clipboard, or a prompt that you enter, and return the results in a structured outline format. First, you need to install the AI Tools plug-in. Then you can install plug-ins Omni has written such as Outline the Clipboard or Step-List Generator or write your own (in JavaScript). Installation is easy: you can just click special links rather than having to download files and move them into place (though you can also do that if you prefer).
Currently, I see this as more a technology preview that shows potential than a feature I would use in actual work. The sample plug-ins seem useful in theory—e.g. helping you get unstuck by breaking down tasks—but do not provide features that I personally need. Apple doesn’t currently provide a user-level front end for its models. I can imagine a future where an OmniOutliner document becomes an interactive document—like a Mathematica notebook or a BBEdit AI Worksheet. This seems like an almost ideal interface for prompting an LLM because you’d get a local artifact with rich text, structure, and powerful search. Unfortunately, the results from Apple’s local model seem far behind the online competition. The answers aren’t as good and aren’t consistent; sometimes there will be a reasonable amount of detail with good formatting, but other times it will be very brief or make each line a new indented outline child, creating a pyramid of doom.
In testing, I constantly ran into errors. Both the input and output have to fit into 4,096 tokens or you get “insufficient maximum response token limit.” And lots of seemingly benign text triggered “content likely to be unsafe” errors. The local models are also really slow, often taking 30 seconds or more on an M1 Pro. There’s no progress indicator, so sometimes it isn’t clear whether it’s still thinking or the process has stopped with an error (shown in the separate Console window). Presumably, this will improve over time with better models and faster hardware.
Theme colors can now automatically update when Dark Mode is turned on or off. Override the automatic color conversion when desired, to create your own light or dark appearance.
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Image attachments can now be resized to better fit your content. Additionally, attachment support, previously a Pro-only feature, is now available in the Essentials edition of OmniOutliner.
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New “Pasting from other apps” setting offers options for pasting styled text. Dedicated menu items are now available for “Paste and Merge Styles,” “Paste and Match Style,” and “Paste with Original Style” behaviors.
Styled text is great, but moving it between Mac apps has always been a source of friction. Paste and Match Style is usually what I use throughout macOS because it will discard unwanted formatting from the source, making the text harmonious with the destination. Paste and Merge Styles is a new Omni-specific feature that’s better in that it preserves essential styles such as bold and italic, while matching the font and color of the destination. When I wanted to preserve those, I used to have to do a regular (full) paste and then go into the Style Attributes in the inspector and click the × button for the attributes that I wanted to delete. Now this is handled automatically.
(Note: The Mac version of OmniOutliner does still support lots of different options for bold, strikethrough, and underlined text. You can still access these by clicking and holding on the buttons in the inspector, even though the little pop-down menu arrows indicating that this is possible have been removed.)
Paste and Match Style is still useful when you want to strip those basic styles, too, or get rid of links. Unfortunately, it does not get rid of links when copying and pasting from OmniFocus to OmniOutliner. I never want these links because I’m typically cutting OmniFocus actions to move them to OmniOutliner. By the time I paste the text, the targets of the links no longer exist. These dead links are pernicious because I can’t even get rid of them using the Remove Link command; that leaves black text with a blue underline, and the cursor still changes to the pointing finger even though there’s no more link to click. The solution I found is to use a script to only copy the plain text from OmniFocus. Omni also supplies a plug-in.
OmniOutliner 6.1, available today for all platforms, introduces a powerful collection of new Shortcuts actions—bringing the collection of actions available for automating OmniOutliner via shortcuts to 25!
OmniOutliner is a universal purchase that’s $24.99 for Essentials and $99.99 for Pro (50% off for upgrading) or $49.99/year.
See also: Bicycle For Your Mind, 9To5Mac, Mac Power Users Talk.
Previously:
- Foundation Models Framework
- Apple Intelligence Foundation Language Models
- Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking
- Omni Group’s New Licensing
- OmniOutliner 5
