THE OMNI SHOW

Ken Case: Recently we heard from Phil Alden Robinson, who's a film director and screenwriter whose films include Field of Dreams, Sneakers, Sum of all Fears. And he wrote and said, "I've been using OmniOutliner for 20 years and it's truly the best and most trusted system I've found to stop trying to use my brain as a filing cabinet."

Sal Soghoian: For creating a holiday pound cake. We'll see if the Apple intelligence can actually do a recipe and I'm going to click continue. And on the right-hand side in the console, intelligence is in the holiday mood too. And you can see in the right-hand side-

Andrew J. Mason: You're listening to The Omni Show where we connect with the amazing community surrounding the Omni Group's award-winning products. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we learn about the release of OmniOutliner 6. Well, welcome everybody to this episode of The Omni Show. My name's Andrew J. Mason, and today we're doing something a little bit special actually. I'm joined by Ken Case, CEO of the Omni Group and Sal Soghoian, automation guru. And Ken, Sal, welcome back to the Omni Show. We're so grateful you could spend some time with us today.

Ken Case: Oh, thank you.

Sal Soghoian: Thank you for the invitation.

Andrew J. Mason: Absolutely. And today, just to let folks know, let everybody in on this, we're going to discuss and get to show you a bit of OmniOutliner 6. What you'll see today falls into three pretty broad areas. First is a significant modernization of the OmniOutliner 6, which includes extensive UI updates, which Ken's going to walk us through. And then second, there's groundbreaking new Omni links, which make it much easier to reference and reuse and share content, and will be used all across Omni's applications eventually. Documents and Teams, but it's showing up here in OmniOutliner first. And third, how OmniOutliner ties into Apple's foundational models through Omni Automation, which Sal's going to demonstrate with the amazing but very important caveat that what you're seeing today is just the beginning. This is Ignition, not even full liftoff just yet. So for someone who hasn't really even lived in OmniOutliner yet, why is outlining such a foundational workflow? What does it help people accomplish that other tools just can't quite match?

Ken Case: OmniOutliner is designed to be a tool that helps people think. It helps people organize and reorganize information so you can see the full picture and structure information effortlessly. One of the inspirations that we had as we were building OmniOutliner was Steve Jobs' analogy of the computer being a bicycle for the mind that makes your mind more efficient because it has this extra power behind it. And so what we find are that lots of great things begin with outlines. Screenplays and books flow better with outlines, speeches, dissertations, and essays make all the points you want to make. Class notes and meeting agendas created in OmniOutliner have structure that makes them easier to understand. And we have unique features in OmniOutliner that assist with visualizing and planning projects and budgets. So it's just a really useful tool.

Andrew J. Mason: And for folks that maybe don't have hands-on experience with it just yet, who are a few of the kinds of people that are really getting the most value out of software like this? And what are the types of things that we see our customers building?

Ken Case: Sure. Well, we hear people that are doing all kinds of things and we hear from professors, we hear from lawyers, we hear from pastors who are planning their weekly speeches and they have a time budget they have to live within. We hear from screenwriters, from of course, students. In fact, at one point we had the entire state of Maine had purchased licenses for all of their elementary school students just to have on the OmniOutliner on every one of their Macs that they had going on. And so for example, recently we heard from Phil Alden Robinson, who's a film director and screenwriter whose films include Guild of Dreams, Sneakers, Sum of all Fears. And he wrote and said, "I've been using OmniOutliner for 20 years and it's truly the best and most trusted system I've found to stop trying to use my brain as a filing cabinet." We also heard from Mike Burke, a software development director saying, "I lead a hundred plus people across four time zones and I rely on OmniOutliner for project plans, one-on-ones, brainstorming, meeting notes, you name it. I can't imagine life without it." So those are some of the ways that people use OmniOutliner day-to-day. And that's not a huge surprise to me because I live an OmniOutliner as well. I have hundreds of outlines that I use on a frequent basis. I usually have at least a dozen or so open and I'm switching back and forth as I'm working on lots of different projects and keeping track of my notes and plans and so on.

Andrew J. Mason: It's so incredible because I think of outlining outliners sit in that magical space between, it's not as free form as what you would see on a whiteboard or a mind map or something along those lines and not quite as sequential as like a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet where things are just absolutely one, two, three sequential, but it still gives you that chunks of information and there is a bit of a sequencing aspect to it. And I think one of the things about this latest version on the OmniOutliner 6 is that it's a consistent visual redesign across all platforms. So what were some of the modernization goals and what did it take to make it really feel like it was native everywhere people come across it?

Ken Case: Sure. Well, we started out knowing that we wanted to build to make this next version of OmniOutliner more universal across all of Apple's devices. So of course that means bringing it to the Apple Vision Pro for the first time, but it also meant bringing more of the Mac experience. Mac is where the product started so it's the version that is the most mature and has the most features. Bringing more of those features over to the iPad and the iPhone, which are the more recent editions. And also some of the features that we had done for the iPad and iPhone editions, as we found we were limited in terms of our screen real estate and so on. As we got to thinking about it, we thought, well, that makes sense to bring back to the Mac as well. So just some cross pollinization and making the whole thing feel like it's one app across all of the system, because of course that's how people operate in this day and age. We're no longer living in a siloed world where you have just your Mac and you go to that Mac whenever you want to work on an outline. You might have multiple Macs, you might have your desktop Mac and your MacBook that you take with you. You'll probably have an iPhone in your pocket and you might have an iPad or you might have your Apple Vision Pro. And you want all of these to work together. You want the app to feel the same across all of them. Of course, that means the feature set that we just talked about. It also means look and feel. And one of the challenges there has of course been that Apple's look and feel across the different platforms has been very different at different times. And so the way iOS7 looked did not look the same as the way Mac OS Aqua looked and so on. And as Apple would do redesigns, they would usually do them for one platform at a time and pieces of it might come over to the others and so on, but it was very different. So one of the great things about Liquid Glass, and I know people have some concerns about Liquid Glass as well, I don't want to dismiss that. But I think it's important to also recognize that Liquid Glass did something really great, which is it tried to bring one unified look and feel across all the platforms at the same time, which is the first time that Apple's really done this. And for us as software developers, that makes our design work so much easier if we can expect that a button looks like a button across all of the platform. A toolbar item looks like a toolbar item across all the platforms. And it's not having to teach people, here's how you find a toolbar item on this platform versus on that platform and have completely different screenshots in the documentation and so on.

Andrew J. Mason: For people listening in, we've asked to see if Ken could also give us some visual as well. So we'll be describing things as we're showing them, but if you're watching with us, you'll actually get to see it happen as well. I'll let you take it away here, Ken. One of the things that I think longtime users will notice right away is ... Well, there's a lot. I'll actually let you do show and tell from here. Take it in any direction you want to, but if you're looking at this for the first time, you're going to say, "Okay, this is different."

Ken Case: Yeah. So what I have here are actually my notes for this conversation, because as I said, I live in OmniOutliner and so whatever I'm doing, I tend to make notes about what we're doing. So this part of the outline here is just a quick review of what is OmniOutliner about, what kinds of things can you do with it? I've got here some examples of other documents and how ... For those who aren't familiar with OmniOutlet, what I'm doing here is I'm bringing up an example of conference talk here. And what's interesting about this example is not just that it has organized everything into an outline, but that the outline automatically just as you move things around. So as I move an item and it's children around, you'll see that this item A, brief overview of the talk, if I move it above the hook, now it becomes 1A, whereas previously one is my introduction, A was hook, B is brief overview of the talk, C is the thesis statement. And as I decide, oh, well, maybe I want to reorganize this around, it will automatically keep track of those numberings. If I indent and outdent, it will automatically change which level of thing is going on. So if I change the thesis statement to be parallel to the introduction, then it becomes two instead of being 1C. And so that's a basic thing in outlining, but it's important because it lets you stop thinking about managing all of those bits and pieces yourself. You know that it's going to keep track of where all that's going because you're moving entire thoughts, including the child thoughts and so on around at once, this restructuring becomes much easier with these easy keyboard shortcuts for moving and for indenting and out denting, for moving rows up and down, or of course, you can use the mouse and drag the stuff around. The outline that works the same way. So one of the things that we did in this version of OmniOutliner was we thought, well, it's great that you can quickly navigate around the outline as you've been able to do this whole time, but what if you could also open more than one window on your outline? And so on the same outline here, then I can have several windows open. They can all be looking at different parts of the outline focused in on different things. If I like, I can drag stuff from one window to another and all of that stuff just works seamlessly. So it makes sense to put something in a different part of the outline. Well, you don't have to go find it in that particular window. You can just drag between one to window and another and have all of that content come across. So that's one of the new features that we brought to the Mac version, which as I mentioned before, was the most developed. The one with the longest history. It's the one that we shipped with Mac 0S 10 just nearly 25 years ago. So as we're now on version 6, we've had a lot of time to think about what are some of the things that we would like to have ... Extra power that we'd like to have on this version, and that was one of the things.

Andrew J. Mason: Absolutely. I think of people that are listening too, it's not the granularity of having to put your cursor exactly in the sentence where it needs to be and finding the exact ending of that idea. This is now more of that like note cards flow where you have chunks of information and you're just visually grouping on where they need to go. It's so cool to get to see that happen.

Ken Case: Another thing that we realized we wanted to modernize for these latest operating systems was that since Outliner 5 shipped, dark mode was introduced across all of the platforms. And so of course people are often switching between light and dark mode. They might even do it automatically based on the time of day. And we had already adopted the app itself so that all of the apps Chrome would adjust between light and dark, but many customers said, "Well, couldn't my outline also adjust between light and dark?" And that was a puzzle for us because we were trying to preserve all of the styles and so on that everybody might already have in their outlines. And we were worried about, well, what's going to happen if we're adjusting those automatically. So in a typical omni fashion, we gave people the option. You can decide should a document be dynamic or not? Should it have a dynamic adaptive theme that adapts to light and dark, or do you want to have it be fixed as light or fixed as dark? And if you want, you can even customize and say that the light background is maybe yellow and the dark background is blue as we see with like a solarized theme. So if I bring up our template picker, all of our templates have now been modernized to support light and dark mode. And if I switch my entire system between light and dark mode, I can see if I'm set to dynamic mode, I see all of these immediately adjust between those two settings. I can also, within that picker, say, "Well, I'm only interested in having an outline that always has a light background or always has a dark background." And so I can pick specifically and say, "I'm not wanting a dynamic theme. I'm wanting a fixed dark theme, our light theme." And as I switch back and forth, all of these templates will automatically adjust and switch back and forth with me.

Andrew J. Mason: This is me, by the way. I'm this exact use case. I'm dark theme on the system itself. And then I love to have the inside of the page white, because who knows, if you're going to print this thing out on the printer ... Trying to think of what it looks like inverted or whatever, I can't get my mind around that. So that's really handy to have.

Ken Case: So we have the same thing, of course, in the iPad app where it also has the light modes and the dark modes, and they're all dynamic. And if I go select one of these, we wanted to make sure all of this functionality that we were building and advancing was stuff that now benefits all of the platforms at once because we're considering it a universal app, not just an app that was being adapted for each platform. Of course, there are things that have to be adapted for each platform. The platforms are different, the screen sizes are different and so on, but it's pretty exciting to have a lot more of this capability across all of them at once.

Andrew J. Mason: And you do mention, all platforms does include Vision Pro as well. We had been talking before this, and you were talking to me about this unique use case for Vision Pro that feels a little bit uniquely different compared to the other platforms. Do you mind sharing what you can accomplish with that?

Ken Case: Sure. Well, one of the interesting things that Apple just introduced in VisionOS 26 this year was they made it possible to have a spatial experience where you can place a window at a particular location and when you come back to that location, the window will still be there. And you can decide whether that location is floating in space or pinned to an object. So you can pin something to your refrigerator door or to the wall right above your laundry or something. And it can be little reminders there about what you're doing in that context. So of course, that's only helpful if it's somewhere that you're going to be wearing your Vision Pro. I know not everybody's going to wear your Vision Pro everywhere you go. But if you are using your Vision Pro that way, or maybe you're in a workplace where that makes sense to be doing that, then it's really great to have this capability of having outlines tied to specific locations or objects. Some of the things that we brought over to the iPad and iPhone that weren't there before were the advanced filtering options that we have where you can have powerful filters that are based on text matching or row status column values. In OmniOutliner, we have custom columns and you can say that this column has popup ... This what's between these values. You can extend those values or you can have check boxes or numbers with automatic totals or minimums and maximums and so on. And we brought that over to the iPhone and iPad, and of course the Apple Vision Pro, support for grid lines, style attributes, row indentation, notes that span columns, all kinds of features that we just didn't have the capability of doing very easily before. And one of the reasons that we're able to do this now, and we weren't before, is because we made this investment in rebuilding some of our code and Swift UI, which is much easier to share across all of the platforms. And so it's relatively new compared to AppKit and UiKit, which have been around. At Omni, we've been using AppKit now since 1989, so that's a long time. So some parts of our experience, we still use the more mature frameworks. And so like the core outlining experience is still done in AppKit on the Mac and it's still done UIKit on iOS. But all of the inspectors, all of the navigation, the toolbars and so on, now that can be shared code that is written in Swift UI and that makes it so much easier for us to maintain and make all of these features universal. So we also have now resizable image attachments. So if I go in here and I take a picture of my desktop and I paste that into my outline, well, okay, that picture is now the exact same size as the part of the desktop that I just took a picture of. If I took a screenshot of the whole screen and I put that in my outline, well, that's going to get a little bit unwieldy. And so what I want is ... And now we have in this version of OmniOutliner, is the ability to just resize the image and say, "Here's how big or small I want it to be so it feels appropriate for that part of the outline."

Andrew J. Mason: That's awesome. And honestly, that's something that feels right. Again, not a small change, but when you're working with it it just allows you to stay in that mental flow of what am I really trying to accomplish in my outline versus, "Oh, okay, this image is too big. I got to resize it and figure this thing out. How's that going to work?" It's just there. It goes back to Apple's ... One of their earlier times, it just works. I'm so excited because what we consider to be a pretty groundbreaking new edition here is Omni Links. And for listeners that are hearing that term for the first time, tell us what are Omni Links and how do Omni Links change the way that people reference and reuse content across their documents and their projects because this is big.

Ken Case: Sure. Well, one of the interesting things about OmniOutliner is that it's not something stored on somebody else's computer, unlike a lot of modern web-based tools where you are maybe storing your data in the cloud somewhere. And if you want to link to that data, well, all you do have to do is link to where it lives up there in the cloud. So OmniOutliner though is designed to be something that you have your own data, it's on your devices and you have full control over where it exists and who has access to it and so on. As a result, that meant that ... We had designed OmniOutliner with links in mind in the first place, like we had the ability to link to documents that were on your Mac disc from maybe not in version one, but I'm pretty sure we had it there in version two. So it's been over 20 years now that this feature has been in there. But over the decades since then, that feature has gotten harder and harder to actually use because sandboxing being introduced because of just the way we changed how we use our devices, that you're no longer just on your single Mac. And so you go to another Mac while those links don't necessarily work the same way because the paths are different because your username's different maybe, or you go to your iPhone and it doesn't make sense at all anymore and so on. But we think it's important to be able to link from one document to another, to be able to create these small documents that are focused on an agenda for a single meeting or a budget or whatever, and not try to have one mammoth outline that has everything because the structure of your data isn't the same from one thing to another. You're going to have multiple columns in your budget. You're not going to want those in your notes and so on. So you need to be able to link between the documents to really make use of this power. And ideally, you want to be able to link to other kind of documents from other apps as well. With the way Omni Links work, basically they're trying to restore that capability, that power that the web was built on, right? The whole worldwide web was designed around this idea of hyperlinks for you. You see a link in a page and you click on it and it takes you to another page. And those who are listening, one of the things that I've been doing all along through this demo process was demonstrating that I could open these different documents with some of the features that I was talking about as I went along. And all of these are different links that are now built using Omni links. And so just now that flexibility, that flexibility isn't just limited to one platform. So I had those links on my Mac. So if I switch over to the iPad and I look at the same document, I can follow a link there and the same thing happens, right? I get this link that now works across all of the platforms. I didn't have to store it on somebody else's computer. Obviously the files had to be synced between the different devices and we figure that at this point, that's something that everybody has found a solution for already. If you are syncing individually, you're probably syncing your documents using something like iCloud or maybe Google Drive or whatever. You've found a solution to the problem of getting these documents from one device to another and you don't need us to solve that problem. You want us to solve the problem of how do I link to that content now? And so this solution has been built to be completely agnostic as to how you're syncing the data. It just cares that the data gets synced over there. And then once it does, the links can work automatically. And so how do you actually create these links in the first place? Well, I just go over and I select a row in a document. I might select a view or filter or whatever. I can say, this is what I want to look at, but whatever it is that I decided to look at, I can then make a selection, maybe even more than one row, and then I say copy Omni Link, which is in the edit menu or in the contextual menu, either one. And then I can go somewhere else and say, okay, what do I want to name that link, link to my book list selection here.I can paste in that URL and now that link is active. All I have to do is click on the link and voila, it goes back to that same selection, same content. It doesn't have to be on this device. I can go to another device and follow that same link. It doesn't even have to be me personally. So I mentioned earlier that we think the problem of syncing documents and sharing documents is not necessarily the problem we have to solve. We also know that one of the ways that Teams share documents, they found all kinds of mechanisms for sharing documents, whether it's a shared server that they're connecting to, or they're using a sync solution that has sharing built in, like Box or Dropbox maybe, or iCloud with its sharing, or maybe they're using something like source code management. They're using GitHub to store their documents. And so they check them in and they check them out. And again, it doesn't matter how the data was synced. All that matters is that the data is over there. And so if I want to link to some file like that, I've got these hikes here and I know they're stored in a folder that I've got shared with Sal, then I can say here, "Hey Sal, if you come up and visit us here in Seattle, we've got this great mountain nearby mountain right near and it has some neat trails on it. Let me just send you one of the links and we can think about if I want to go to that." So I'll copy that as an omnilink. Let me just go paste this into the chat window, let him pick up the story.

Sal Soghoian: Well, I first of all appreciate the consideration that Ken has. So when I come to visit, he's got some nice activities planned for me. I appreciate that. It makes it wonderful. The thing, the way we work at Omni is that we use our products and we quite often find that when we face a challenge ourselves, if we figure out the solution that's practical and works and is repeatable for us, quite often addresses our customers' needs as well. And that's really the situation with Omni Links. We quite often keep a lot of our planning and thoughts and things that we're tracking in outlined form. And as Ken has been showing and pointing out many times with Omni Links, you not only link to the particular document, but to that selected set of items in that document that we might be discussing at a particular meeting or something. And we've already set up shared folder system with people within the company. So sharing the document itself is not the issue. It's getting you to that particular set of thoughts quickly so we can discuss that. And that's the real power that's going on here that's different from your traditional links that Ken was talking about that you find on the internet. So right now you should be seeing my screen and I have an outline open. It's about adding solar power to a home or something. And I've copied that link that Ken put in the clipboard on our chat and I'm going to open that link and see what document Ken had planned for me. So let me open that. There it goes. Okay. So it opened up and it selected a set of hikes that Ken things I could actually do to look ambitious for a guy like me, but I do like to hike and I do like to take advantage of the wonderful things up in that area while I'm there. And that's actually a great thing. But you notice that it came across easily. I didn't have to go find the document. I didn't have to open it. I didn't have to scroll through it to find a particular section. All of that information was contained in that link. And for me, it was just a matter of clicking on the link and magic happens. And that's the productivity idea and concept that we worked on and we've been using ourself within this whole system and I'm really enjoying what you can do with Omni Links.

Andrew J. Mason: It's so cool to see because that is how companies work together. And to be able to not have to sit there and fish through, okay, it's in this file, this is however long the file is. And for those that are familiar with the buzzword-

Sal Soghoian: Yeah, David has a way of getting to the point, doesn't he?

Andrew J. Mason: I coined it from Max Sparky when he was on an episode earlier, but I know at some point somebody's shared the idea of contextual computing. This is all about just stripping away the context and tunneling you right through to the information that you need. I mean, it's beautiful to see.

Sal Soghoian: Yeah. David has a way of getting to the point, doesn't he?

Andrew J. Mason: He does.

Sal Soghoian: We appreciate that.

Andrew J. Mason: But I know you, Sal, too. This is already pretty cool, but is there anything that we can do here that would even start to push this a bit further?

Sal Soghoian: Well, as you know, my focus within the company is a bent on automation. I'm always trying to figure out, is there a way that we can expose this functionality to our plugin developers and customers so that they could even enhance it more or personalize it more? At Omni, we're very focused on personalizing the use of our software and keeping your data available to you and your device. And so I looked for different ways with Omni Automation to work with Omni Links. And I found a couple that I'd be happy to share with you today, and I'll be showing you some plugins that you can get today as well. And one of the first things I thought of was, well, can I take these Omni links and save them and make them so that I can get to them anytime that I want? And I was thinking of something that's a little bit easier than storing them in a particular document and then opening that document. And what I came up with was a plugin that allows you to store your Omni links and then retrieve them and at the same time do different functions with links that are retrieved. So let me show you how that would work. As I mentioned earlier, I have an outline in front of me that's multiple steps for adding solar power to a home. And quite often within Omni, we have particular sections of documents that we share that might be pertinent to a particular conversation. So I'm going to select a section of this document. I'm going to select the last couple items here, and I'm going to go to the edit menu and choose copy Omni Link as you see I've selected. And that makes a reference not only to that document, but to that particular selection. Puts it on the clipboard for me. And now I'm going to go to the automation menu and call up a plugin that is called Archive Omni Lake. And it will bring up a dialogue asking for a title for this particular link. And I'm going to say home solar last section and name that link. And you'll hear a voice confirming this.

Speaker 5: The Element Home Solar last section has been added to the archive.

Sal Soghoian: For my plugins myself, I always have voice confirmation. And since using text to speech is built into Omni Automation naturally, it's easy for me to make these little confirmations so that I'm sure that that link got stored and archived. Now, the next thing that you can do with a link is you could have these links sitting around in a document and then you want to call it up even when you're in some other document or you don't have the particular document open, but I can go up to the automation menu and then choose a second plugin called Omni Link's Archive. And when I select that, it brings up a dialogue with a menu that shows all of my particular stored links that I use. Now, this might be quite often some legalese that I insert in things when I'm developing on Omni-Automation website, or it might be something that we're working on particularly within the company, but you can see as I scroll down this list, there's that one I just created, the home solar last section. So I'm going to select that from my pop-up menu, and then I'm going to click continue. And a second dialogue appears, and it has a list of actions I can do with that Omni link. I can, first of all, open it. That's an option if I want to open a document. The next is I could copy that link to the clipboard if I wanted to share it with somebody else. I could share it using the system share panel, which includes messages, free form, different applications. The system share panel's pretty extensive. Or I can create a new document using just the linked rows, or I could add the link rows to the existing document I have open. So I'm going to choose the option to create a new document using just those link rows, and I'm going to go continue.

Speaker 5: New file with linked content.

Sal Soghoian: And you heard the voice confirm that there's a new file that the link content was created. And as you can see, I have it open here. It automatically found that document, opened it, grabbed the section that I was really interested, closed the document, created a new document with that content from the specific section, and did that all for me instantly. So here again, we're using Omni Automation to actually speed up that whole process and make it even less complex for me so I don't have to manage any of the files from the link. It just instantly gives me what I want.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. Simplification is the name of the game here. If you're running or driving in your car ... Just to reiterate, Sal has effectively set up a routing system based on some JavaScript for Omni Automation or OmniJS, I'm sorry.

Sal Soghoian: Mm-hmm.

Andrew J. Mason: That effectively just creates a templating system for this entire thing to pull up all this stuff at will. That is nuts to me.

Ken Case: And one of the fun things about this is this is a workflow that Sal can create for his specific needs and purposes. And then of course he can share it and anyone else can adapt it to their specific needs. But really here, what has happened is Omni Links have unlocked more power and automation because Omni Automation now is able to reference a lot of content that previously might've been invisible to it. It was just stuck within its own document and couldn't get to information that was stored in other places.

Sal Soghoian: What's a great point, Ken, is that it allows automation to have a larger scope and reach outside that document-based context, and you can pull in data from wherever you're at. And I didn't design this little plugin example to be a heavy duty link management system. It just is for the dozen or so documents that I quite use often or a particular thing, and it keeps it all in the little text file in your documents folder. It's really simple. But you can see what Omni Links has done. It's activated this level of productivity that is unheard of. This is exactly what you want. You want it to do what you need, get what you need, present it for you, and get out of your way and this is a great example of that. But it's just one of the things that is available now with Omni Automation in OmniOutliner 6. We have a lot of new functionality that is quite incredible that I'd like to bring up to you. Let me set this up first.

Andrew J. Mason: Yeah. And while you're setting this up, if somebody wants to try this out, realistically, you were saying this can happen now.

Sal Soghoian: Everything I'm going to show you today and everything I'm showing you today, including those peer plugins, is available. You go get your copy of OmniOutliner 6 and you can go to the omni-automation.com website and download the plugins right away. So all of this is available to you. And as you know, one of the nice things about Omni Automation is that it uses the built-in JavaScript that's part of the operating system. It's the same JavaScript that Safari uses. It's highly optimized, very powerful, extensive scope, and it's all built into every Omni application. You don't have to install any third party JavaScript runtimes or anything else. Our plugins are single file. They're very lightweight, fully editable, and easy to install. You can just click an install link and it installs for you right there. You don't have to do anything, get anything, or find a file in your folder. It's all transparent. So I have a document open here on the left-hand side. I'm using the split screen on Mac OS, so I have the document here on the left. Now, with Omni Automation, every document has a corresponding console window if you want to use it that I have here on the right-hand side. And the console is where we enter and execute our scripts. And I'd like to talk about now what we've enabled with the new level of Apple intelligence and Omni Automation. Apple has onboard Apple intelligence that they use quite a lot. Anytime you summarize text or you use any of the writing tools that are part of Mac OS or all the different platforms, that's the onboard intelligence. And what Apple has done is they've enabled developers like Omni to access that core functionality. And what we've done at Omni is pass our access onto our plugin developers. And I'd like to show you an example of the kind of use that we would come up with for working with this level of intelligence and show you exactly how it's done. So I have a document here on the left. I'm using the Mac OS split screen. And on the left-hand side, I have just a blank OmniOutliner document. And every document has a corresponding automation console window that you can enter the scripts that pertain to that particular document. And I have that open on the right. So while I'm demonstrating Omni Automation, you're going to get to see what goes on behind the scenes on the right-hand side and the results on the left. So the first thing that we have is there's two ways to communicate with the new intelligence architecture, the Apple Foundation Models Framework or AFM, as I often call it. You can have it give you a response to a query or a prompt in text format or just as data, clear data that you can then take and work with. Let me show you what's involved with doing just a basic query with a text response. So I have here at the top of my console window, I've installed some plugins that will make this a little bit quicker for us. So I'm going to click the one that says Basic AI, and that puts an example on the clipboard that I can paste in. So here is the code that would be required to do a query of the onboard intelligence and get back a response. And I'll walk us through just the three lines of code that there is. The first thing is that anytime you talk to the Apple intelligence that's on your computer or device, you can use natural language to communicate. And here, my prompt or my query is a simple statement of provide a brief history of Apple Ink. It can be any topic you want. It could be ask for more detail, but here I'm just providing a simple request. Give me a quick brief history of Apple Inc. And then once I've decided what my prompt is, then the next thing we do is we create a session and we use our new class of the language model class and we create a session with that, and that sets up a query with this onboard intelligence. And then once we've done that, then we can activate that query and then wait for a response. So basically three steps. You figure out what your prompt is, you create a session, you activate the session and wait for the response. So let me hit the return key here and watch in this console window as we wait for the onboard intelligence to respond to us. The speed at which it responds depends upon the complexity of the question and what hardware are you using, all those kind of things. Let's see what it says. Okay. So here it provided a block of text, as you can see here on the console window. It lists different points in history involving Apple and gives a description of it. Now, one thing to note is anytime you're using a language model like what this is, this onboard language model, when you're asking for historical data, it can sometimes make a mistake. So it's always important to check the quality and see if it's accurate and see what it says. But that says all it took was three lines of this JavaScript to be able to communicate and use the Apple intelligence. So we say it takes very little code to be able to get a text response, but if you're looking for particular specific data that you want to use in your plugin to be able to perform some kind of task, then Apple's also provided a way for that. And it's called using a JavaScript object notation to create a schema. A schema is a simple example showing the language model how you want the data returned. So for that, I'll pull up another little plugin here that I have on the toolbar and I'm going to ask the language model on board for give me the names of the planets in the solar system, and I'm going to request it as a list of text strings. You can have integers or SMOs, whatever those types of data that you want to return. And so I'll ask the language model, please give me this at a back. And as I go, you can see on the right-hand side an example of that JavaScript object notation or JSON, how I want the data returned. And then below that, you can see there are the names of the planets and the solar system all cleaned in an array that I can use in my plugin and distribute the data right away. So there's two ways to get data back from the language model as text or as a data. Now, how does that actually get used in a practical sense? Let's take a look at an example. So on the left-hand side here, I have my document. I'm going to go to the automation menu and I'm going to use another example plugin you can download today, and it's called the step list generator. And basically it's a dialogue. I can put my prompt in and request a list of steps to do something. And here I'm going to say, give me the steps for creating a holiday pound cake. We'll see if the Apple Intelligence can actually do a recipe and I'm going to click continue. And on the right-hand side in the console, you can see that it's just stated the prompt and it's beginning the query and it might take a little bit for this challenging task to perform. Well, it wasn't too long. Apparently the onboard intelligence is in the holiday mood too. And you can see in the right-hand side in the console window that it came back as JavaScript optic notation or JSON. All the individual steps that were involved, there are child steps in some of them as Ken has called them. Some of them are just basic steps and some have actually child steps involved in them on the left-hand side. And then I can take this kind of thing and now that it's generated that, of course, I can use Omni Automation in a way to communicate with other apps like, let's export this to obsidian. First of all, let me copy my Omni Link for that document and then export it over to Obsidian, which is my data storage. And you could see that the entire outline came through with all the disclosure triangles and everything and a link back to the document and Omni link back to it as well an identifier. So I'm not only able to use Apple intelligence to generate and help get me started on a particular outline, I can then take that and use Omni Automation to send it over to another application to use an entirely different way. No. However, with OmniOutliner 6, we have another new Apple Intelligence feature that we're introducing with OmniOutliner 6. The ability for you as a Omni plugin developer to create your own set of AI tools to get called by the operating system. It's really a powerful feature and it's called AI tools. And I have a great example if you'd like to see that in action, but let me take what I have here and for this, I'm going to switch over to an article from Apple about they introduce this new digital ID feature in the wallet, and I'd like to get the text of that, scan that, and have that summarized for me as a new outline. And one of the things about Apple PR Newsroom is if you scroll down to the bottom of any article there, you can see you can get the text of the article by clicking a link. And I'm going to do that and copy the text from that, switch back over to OmniOutliner. Now, I have a plugin that you can download today and it is called Outline the Clipboard. And when I select that plugin, it uses an Apple AI tool that I created to get the contents of the clipboard, then it scans it, organizes it, summarizes it and creates a new outline for me. So I'm going to activate that now from the automation menu and you can see on the right-hand side it grabbed the data from the clipboard, it used the tool, now it's analyzing it, and then it says, an outline is ready. Would you like that outline to be a new document or appended to the outline below? I'll say create a new outline. And there you go. You can see that it summarized the contents of the clipboard. Let me make this a little bit bigger. Got the key points out of that news announcement and created a new document for me automatically just by going to the automation menu and activating that plugin. So there's an example of using the new enhanced AI abilities that come default with OmniOutliner 6. So when you get your copy, go to the omni-automation.com website, download these plugins and try them out yourself.

Ken Case: One of the things I wanted to note about our approach to Apple Intelligence and AI generally is that all of this that the Sal has been demonstrating is offline, it's private, it's customizable, it's under your control and it's happening based on the power of the device that's already at your fingertips. It's not reliant on anything out in the cloud. So it's not burning energy other than what your laptop is already there. You know how much it takes to charge or whatever and how much power it's using. You're not just using some invisible resources. And this is all completely opt-in. None of this is being thrust on anybody. And we think that's important because there are a lot of concerns with how some people have been pushing towards AI and other solutions. And we think it's an important area that we don't want to ignore. And we're pretty excited by the capabilities, as you can see. But at the same time, we want to approach it in a very thoughtful way that puts the user in charge of everything and make sure that they hold the reins. They're the ones that get to decide where their data is going, how it's being used, and so on. And the whole Omni Automation story is new since we shipped OmniOutliner 5, which is kind of funny to think about. When we shipped OmniOutliner 5, we didn't have any of this support with the JavaScript, with the plugins and so on. We introduced that in all of these releases that we've done since then, and Outliner has become more and more powerful. But if you only looked maybe at the last major release and what we announced at that time, all of this is [inaudible 00:47:42] so welcome and I hope you enjoy what we've been up to.

Sal Soghoian: And it's fun.

Andrew J. Mason: Incredible. Ken and Sal, I so appreciate the time you've invested in sharing just some of the possibilities. Hopefully as people are hearing this, they're hearing their own use cases start to show up and not only how they've been working, but maybe some new things that they could try that they haven't before, because that curiosity is what helps us improve and I think that's a great thing. Also, just a thank you to both of you and also to the rest of the team for the amount of ... You can really tell a lot of care went into this on. A personal level, I mean, software doesn't stick around for decades unless we truly care about it. And that's something that I really just wanted to throw out there and bring to the forefront. So thank you both for hanging out with us today. So honored to be able to chat about this. Hey, and thank all of you for listening today too. You can find us on Mastodon at The Omni Show at omnigroup.com. You can also find out everything that's happening with the Omni Group at omnigroup.com/blog.