The Omni Group

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The Omni Group
Type	Private
Founded	1989
Headquarters	Omni Development, Inc. 2707 NE Blakeley Street Seattle, WA 98105-3118
Key people	Ken Case, Tim Wood
Industry	Computer software
Products	Mac OS X software, see #Products, below
Website	http://www.omnigroup.com/

The Omni Group is a company that develops software for the Mac OS X platform. The Omni Group was informally founded as a NEXTSTEP consulting company in 1989 by Wil Shipley, who immediately brought on Ken Case and Tim Wood. The three incorporated together under the name Omni Development, Inc. in 1993, because the name "Omni Group" was taken by another Seattle firm. Omni initially produced custom database software for the NEXTSTEP platform for clients such as the William Morris Agency and McCaw Cellular Communications (now Cingular Wireless). During this period they also ported a number of games to NEXTSTEP, then later to Mac OS X (after Apple acquired NeXT in 1997). Around 2000 the company decided to start focusing on their own consumer applications for the Mac, and as of 2004 the vast majority of their revenue came from their consumer products. In 2003 Ken Case took over as the chief officer of Omni, and in March 2004 Wil Shipley left with another Omni employee, interface designer Mike Matas, to form Delicious Monster.

The Omni Group also administers several mailing lists related to Mac OS X and software development. They also provide several frameworks for Cocoa software development under an open source license.

Advocates say that their productivity applications, especially OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner, are excellent examples of user interface design. They have won several awards, such as an Eddy for Most Innovative Browser from Macworld for OmniWeb and an Eddy for OmniGraffle. At the Macintosh Worldwide Developers Conference in 2001, OmniWeb 4.0 won two Apple Design Awards: "Best Mac OS X User Experience" and "Best New Mac OS X Product." In 2002 OmniGraffle 2.0 won two more Apple Design Awards.