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The Omni Group

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The Omni Group
Company typePrivate
IndustryComputer software
Founded1989
HeadquartersOmni Development, Inc.
3257 16th Avenue West
Seattle, WA 98119-1760
Key people
Ken Case, Tim Wood
ProductsMac OS X software, see #Products, below
Websitehttp://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 (then Cingular Wireless; now AT&T). 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. Matas later left for Apple.

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.

Products

Productivity

Frameworks

The Omni Group uses many frameworks in their applications[1], and releases them under an open source license[2]. Most of the frameworks are dependent on the Mac OS X platform, and require Xcode 2.3 and thus Tiger.

Games

As users of a platform that was not targeted by commercial porting houses, the Omni Group historically did source ports of games for NeXTStep/OpenStep pro bono, especially maintenance updates of id games. They continued to do so during the transition through Rhapsody into OS X, catching the eye of the existing Macintosh games industry in the process, and were then contracted to port a number of games commercially.

  • Activision Anthology: Remix Edition
  • Alchemy Deluxe
  • Aliens Versus Predator 2
  • Big Money! Deluxe
  • Doom
  • Doom II: Hell on Earth
  • Fallout: A Post-Nuclear Role Playing Game
  • Fallout 2
  • Freedom Force
  • Giants: Citizen Kabuto
  • Heavy Metal: F.A.K.K.²
  • Incoming: The Final Conflict
  • No One Lives Forever 2: A Spy in H.A.R.M.'s Way
  • Oni
  • Quake
  • Quake II
  • Quake III: Arena
  • Soldier of Fortune II: Double Helix

References

  1. ^ Developer Source Code
  2. ^ The Omni Source License: a modification of the MIT License

External links

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