Hold breath. Exhale. Focus.

I feel a bit like I’ve been holding my breath for a couple months and can now… exhale. The next logical step in Omni based task management now has an official moniker: OmniFocus.

Whence OmniFocus? As mentioned previously on ye olde omni mouth, the talented folks at Omni junketed me out to Seattle earlier this year for a little “OmniSummit” with their big brains and the crazy-genius of Merlin Mann. Before more on that, some background:

From the beginning of kGTD I considered what a pure-Cocoa Kinkless app would look like. Anyone that has used kGTD in its present form has probably had the same thought about a minute after realizing that Applescript is cool and amazing but has some limitations in achieving the buttery smoothness we all crave in a gtd-esque app. These musings were jotted down into a file I called K2… assuming that kGTD ever got to 1.0 (scheduled to be the same time Flickr is out of ‘gamma’), k2 was my ideal cocoa version of the system. But here’s the thing… OmniOutliner seems so close to what’s needed. If it wasn’t I wouldn’t have been able to tape on the bits of Applescript that make it into whatever kGTD is.

OmniGroup has been very supportive of kGTD from the beginning, clearly making code tweaks and additions to support this nutty venture. At some point it became clear that the next logical step would be to consider Cocoafying the whole shebang. Having the chance to take everything I’d been thinking and working on with kGTD and see it turned into something bigger and better and brighter is like making a doodle on a piece of paper, handing it to da Vinci and seeing it turned into a full color oil painting. Even better: it’s like Da Vinci letting you sit around and gab at them while they do this and ask for “a bit more cobalt-blue in the sky” and “a few more peasants in that bit on the left”.

So back to the Summit: Firstly, OmniGroup is collectively as cool and smart and fun as you’d imagine. Not only are the top notch coders, I found that they have some super skilled in-house UI talent and are all generally big-thinkers. After three days of chats and meetings and white-boarding and photoshopping and debating and joking with Omni and Merlin, there emerged a very clear vision of not just my ideal task-app, but something even greater. I thought I had some clever ideas to brain dump on them, and brain-dump I did. But some of the cleverest things were straight-outta-omni… things that may or may not make it into version 1, but which guarantee that OmniFocus is an app with legs and which you can bet your productivity on now and into the future. And keep in mind that the ineluctable Merlin Mann, godfather of most of us that are being at all productive on the Mac, has some sort of knowledge in his genes about what makes us truly and effectively productive… the insights gleaned from his words of wisdom are another big plus for this new application.

I guess I’m still holding my breath because I’m not going to say much more on details. At the end of the day, after flying in and brain-dumping and watching the progress meter tick upwards as the Omni folks code away, they are the ones that deserve a round of applause and support from those of us that have benefitted and will benefit from their efforts.