512 Pixels

This week on the world’s greatest podcast:

Still reeling from the Apple/Beats news, the boys sit down to talk about music, apps and WWDC.

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Brian Chen at The New York Times:

Apple, the company that turned digital music into a mainstream phenomenon, said on Wednesday that it was buying Beats Electronics, the rising music brand, for $3 billion, in a move that will help it play catch-up with rivals that offer subscription-based music services.

Apple and Beats executives on Wednesday said that the companies would work together to give consumers worldwide more options to listen to music. The Beats brand will remain separate from Apple’s, and Apple will offer both Beats’s streaming music service and premium headphones.

Don’t miss this quote from Tim Cook:

Could Eddy’s team have built a subscription service? Of course. We could’ve built those 27 other things ourselves, too. You don’t build everything yourself. It’s not one thing that excites us here. It’s the people. It’s the service.

Apple’s press release discusses Beats’ headphone business as well as the streaming service, so I expect both to stay around for the forseeable future.

Apple expects to close the deal later this year.

I’ll be checking off these boxes on Monday:

The Verge has put together the motherload of old, weird Apple prototype photos.

Ina Fried:

In his first few months, Nadella has gone to great lengths to show he is a new type of leader in Redmond — from speaking frankly about the competition and challenges to sporting hoodies rather than the Oxford shirts and sweaters of his predecessors.

I like Nadella, and I think he’s going to be great for Microsoft.

Be still, my heart.

If you try to run updates via the Mac App Store today, you will more than likely see this message:

The certificate for this server is invalid. You might be connecting to a server that is pretending to be “swscan.apple.com” which could put you confidential information at risk.

Arnold Kim explains:

Swscan.apple.com is one of several servers that Software Update uses to communicate with Apple. The apparent problem is that the security certificate for the server appears to have expired. The certificate was originally valid from May 22, 2012 to May 24, 2014.

Whoops.

It’s this sort of thing that doesn’t do much for my confidence in Apple’s ability to handle services well in our cloud-centric age.

(Don’t even get me started on having to use the Mac App Store application to update system software.)

Background

I’ve used OmniFocus on and off over the years, but I’ve never used it to its full potential. I don’t use Contexts or Start Dates. I use one custom Perspective that has been replaced entirely by the app’s excellent Forecast mode.

All of that aside, I’ve been keenly interested in OmniFocus 2 for Mac’s development. When the initial beta phase ended, I was discouraged. OmniFocus 1 for Mac was aging, but once the betas fired back up, I jumped back in head-first.

Today, The Omni Group is at the end the long winding road and OmniFocus 2 for Mac is here.

Design

With OmniFocus for iOS 7, the app received a major visual overhaul. While I wasn’t a fan of it at first, I eventually came around to the new look once I got used to the revised organizational structure.

OmniFocus 2 for Mac follows its iPhone-sized cousin’s footsteps. It’s traded checkboxes for large colorful circles and uses white space for structure.

One downside to the new design is a decrease in data density. While this improved during the beta process, OmniFocus 2 shows less tasks on the screen at once than its predecessor. Text size can be adjusted app-wide which can help, however.

This tweak can be implemented to really increase data density, but it comes with some trade-offs I’m not a fan of.

With an OS X redesign rumored to be just weeks away from being announced, I do wonder how close The Omni Group managed to get their puck to where Apple is skating. My guess is the app will be just fine — it looks and feels like the new iWork, complete with the integrated Inspector window.

In short, OmniFocus 2 brings the Mac app into the modern age. Gone is theme support from OmniFocus 1, but I’m okay with it.

A Sidebar on the Sidebar

The new design introduces a sidebar that controls the view, changing it between the following sets of information:

• Inbox
• Projects
• Contexts
• Forecast
• Flagged
• Review

The sidebar — if you have the Pro version of OmniFocus 2 — can be edited via the Perspectives menu:

Starring will add a view to the sidebar, while unstaring will remove it. Perspectives can be re-ordered.

Creating a Perspective is fiddly, but that’s always been a good adjective for OmniFocus. All sorts of parameters can be changed, including grouping, filtering and focus.

While the sidebar demotes the Projects view (which itself is a little hard to read at times) from the main view, I like the change on the whole.

Features

Feature-wise, OmniFocus 2 isn’t a huge leap over OmniFocus 1. In fact, the database structure is identical, meaning bouncing back and forth between versions isn’t a problem.

All of the old favorites are here — repeating tasks, quick entry, great sync options and more. The new features are mostly borrowed from the iOS apps.

My favorite is Forecast. This organizes tasks by Start and Due date, which fits how my brain works really well. First introduced with the iPad version of OmniFocus, the calendar UI is great. Upcoming tasks are yellow; due and overdue are red:

(Sorry about all the Drang-esque data hiding.)

Review is a tool that allows you to work your way through all projects in the app to ensure they are updated. While I like to do this on the couch in my office on Fridays with my iPad, bringing this to the Mac is a great move. It could be done before, but OmniFocus 2 makes it a lot nicer.

Lastly, Quick Open is a new way to navigate the interface with just a keyboard. Typing CMD+O opens a new window, which acts like Spotlight, but just within OmniFocus:

Moving to the correct view in the app is as simple as selecting the correct option with the arrow keys and hitting Enter.

Pricing, Homework

OmniFocus 2 comes in two flavors.

Standard is $39.99 and comes with the basic set of features that form the core of the OmniFocus experience.

Pro is $79.99 and comes with the following additional features:

• Custom perspectives and the ability to edit the sidebar
• Focus mode, which will show individual projects, actions, and item groups
• AppleScript support for automating common tasks, or extend the inter-app functionality of OmniFocus

Here’s how The Omni Group’s handling upgrade pricing:

Customers who purchased OmniFocus 1 from the Omni Store can purchase an OmniFocus 2 Standard license for $19.99 or a Pro license for $39.99. If you bought OmniFocus 1 from the Mac App Store, you can buy OmniFocus 2 and get the Pro feature set for free. To make these options as easy as possible to take advantage of, we’ve created a separate page with step-by-step instructions.

You can buy OmniFocus on the Mac App Store or from The Omni Group directly.

To read more about the app, check out The Omni Group’s free user manual. It’s a quick read with loads of screenshots and is a great place to start, even for OmniFocus veterans.

Conclusion

If you use OmniFocus, upgrading to the new version should be a no-brainer. It’s beautiful, fast and packs the same punch the old version did. It doesn’t bring a long list of new features, but it does its job reliably and easily. It’s hard to ask for much more from a tool I depend on daily.

With an international shortage of Apple news, Myke, Federico and I take on a pile of listener questions.

This is my new favorite episode of our show.

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A great app for sending iOS notifications to your Mac via Bluetooth. I’ve got it setup for GroupMe notifications and it works great, but this is something that iCloud should be able to do.

It’s no secret that over the years, iTunes has become bloated.

What was once an MP3 player has grown into a monstrosity. What started life as SoundJam MP can barely recognize itself in the mirror these days. iTunes can rip and burn CDs (that used to be a big deal, kids), be used to purchase music and other media, stream radio, listen to podcasts, watch movies and sync to not only iPods, but iPhones and iPads, too.

Apple generally likes simplicity, and it’s time that iTunes goes on a diet, as Timer Koala Sing said on Twitter the other day:

Why can’t the media store and App Store merge, iSync can come back for device management, & iTunes can just be a media jukebox?

My buddy Rob chimed in with this, which has to be a factor when considering this:

@timerkoalasing @512px I often wonder if iTunes on Windows is the obstacle.

Apple’s dislike for building Windows apps aside, a world where iTunes gets stripped back would be good for everyone. With the advent of streaming services and things like iCloud, many nerds can go weeks without opening the application. I’ve lost count over the years of times friends or clients have complained about iTunes being slow or confusing.

By returning iTunes to its roots as a music player — and possibly adding streaming — it could make its way back to the Docks of many Mac users.

Perhaps more importantly, putting media purchasing in another (read: better) app could help sales of music, movies and TV shows. Podcasts could enjoy a bigger spotlight. Apps could be treated like first-class citizens, not an add-on to an existing experience.

This sort of move would be big, but not completely unprecedented. With OS X Mavericks, Apple peeled off iBooks into its own silo. While I’m not suggesting Apple follow this road to having a Videos application with a video-only store bolted to the back, I think some splintering of the iTunes conglomerate is overdue.

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