Working at the Mothership

November 10, 2011

First some background.

I’ve been a fan of the work of The Omni Group since I discovered OmniOutliner pre-installed on my 12 inch PowerBook G4 back in 2003. I managed my dissertation project using OmniOutliner and a collection of home-rolled AppleScripts. That script library grew into a full-on GTD system as I finished my PhD and started my faculty career at Rose-Hulman. OmniGraffle was also a big gun in my dissertation arsenal and is even more valuable for creating great figures for my lecture notes.

When the first public betas of OmniFocus rolled out in 2007, I jumped in. The early versions didn’t have all the features of my OmniOutliner-powered system, but in great Omni tradition, OmniFocus was also scriptable. I started writing scripts for OmniFocus and sharing those on the forums. As OmniFocus has become more powerful, I’ve retired many of those scripts. You can find the still-useful ones at my other website. I plan to bring those over here soon. [edit: Those scripts are here now.]

At Your Point Is?

Rose-Hulman focuses on undergraduate education in math, science, and engineering. We work hard to provide a broad, liberal education. At the same time, we want our graduates be productive in their careers from day one. One way the Institute keeps our curriculum up-to-date is through year-long faculty sabbaticals in industry.

When my sabbatical opportunity came around I contacted the great folks at The Omni Group about joining the team. I was thrilled to move to the mothership in June.

In my six months here, I’ve been learning about the internals of all the great apps that I’ve been using all these years. I’ve been working primarily on OmniOutliner for iPad and Mac, plus some framework stuff used in several of our apps. It’s been great fun.

Now that I’m settling into a rhythm at Omni, I’m looking forward to sharing more of my personal AppleScripts here. I also hope to write a bit about software development, software engineering education, and personal productivity.

My writing and scripts here are my own. My words don’t reflect the views of either The Omni Group or Rose-Hulman, and my scripts aren’t supported products. That said, I hope some folks will find all this interesting and useful.

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