The Omni Group, the developers of multiple productivity applications for Mac OS X, has jumped on the iPad's bandwagon and has no intentions of turning back. In a
recent blog post, The Omni Group's CEO Ken Case decided to share his perspective on what Apple is trying to accomplish with the iPad and why his team believes this new device is so very worthy of all of their development time and effort.
Case opens up the blog post by explaining that the company wants to let their users in on what direction they are headed in, and for better or worse, that direction is iPad app development. The reason for this is that he sees the iPad as an extremely important piece of hardware, more than just a big iPod touch. He compares it to the first Macintosh, stating that the iPad is "the best computing device for most of the things people use computers for," not just a gaming device or a mobile web browser.
Case isn't just spewing nonsense either. The Omni Group started developing iPad-specific versions of OmniGraffle, a diagram creating app, and OmniFocus, a task managing app already
available for the iPhone, on the very first day the iPad's SDK was available. This means that the non-iPad versions of both of these apps will be delayed by quite a bit as the company feels the iPad is more important at this moment. The Omni Group also intends on bringing OmniOutliner, OmniPlan, and OmniGraphSketcher over to the iPad when the teams that normally work on those pieces of software are finished with their current projects.
The iPad's launch is still about two months out, but we will hopefully start to see more productivity app developers like The Omni Group jump on board, which may allow the iPad to be truly more than just a media and information consumption device.
