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OmniOutliner 6
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Posted by satis
Nov 4, 2025 at 05:20 PM
OO5 has been in maintenance mode for so long I’m frankly shocked that an update was annouced, and that it contains new features.
https://9to5mac.com/2025/11/04/omnioutliner-6-will-be-a-huge-update-and-you-can-try-it-today/
Currently available for beta testing in TestFlight.
https://www.omnigroup.com/test/
You will be able to link to local documents, as well as work with files in iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, Google Docs, and local servers. Using Apple’s privacy-preserving AI on-device model, Omni’s AI Tools will use Omni plugins to pull information from docs, emails, and webpages, turn it into outlines, and export those outlines into formats like blog posts or Obsidian entries. You can drag and drop between multiple windows (even of the same document, I think) and they’re giving feature parity to iOS/iPadOS versions so you can finally edit filters there.
No word on pricing or if it’s a free update to OO5 users, but I assume not.
Posted by Bob Spies
Nov 4, 2025 at 06:18 PM
I’ll be delighted to pay for it. I’ve felt guilty being such a heavy user of OO5 for years without having to pay anything since the original purchase!
Glad to see Omni hasn’t forgotten it, given how little publicity they’ve been giving it vs. their other products.
Posted by Amontillado
Nov 5, 2025 at 01:16 AM
Indeed, good tho see signs of life. I hope the AI can be turned off.
Linking to files is nice. Better that it will open multiple views of a document.
It’s beta so this isn’t a gripe. There are UI issues in the present OO 6 release. I reported what I found. The production release will be polished.
Posted by Stephen Zeoli
Nov 5, 2025 at 12:47 PM
[Warning: This is probably more off-topic than on.]
Around 2008 I decided to go back to Apple for my personal computing—for the previous 13 years I used PCs, because that’s what I had at work. But two Mac apps convinced me to return to Apple. Those were Scrivener and OmniOutliner. I was drawn to Scrivener because I thought it would help me write my novel. OmniOutliner seemed the nearest thing to the old DOS app I loved, GrandView. Oddly, I’ve never used either of those apps much. Scrivener because I don’t really have a novel in me, I think. OmniOutliner, because… well I’m not sure, but I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that there is a lot of friction using it, and even back then there were more nimble outliners, even if they didn’t pack the same features. Don’t get me wrong, I admire OO—and I think it is great to learn that a new version is in the works. I still have a copy on my current MacBook. I tried to use it the other day, but then thought that I would do better in Workflowy, where I can just bang out the outline. But it still seems the OO is the only local outliner with the ability to add columns for viewing meta data (remind me of others if I’ve forgotten any). That makes it special.
Thanks for the update!
Steve
Posted by Paul Korm
Nov 6, 2025 at 03:39 PM
I’m glad to see OmniOutliner is now a universal app. In the past it was a pain to get files back and forth from the desktop to the mobile app.
“Outliner” always seemed like a misnomer. It’s really more for making fancy data tables.
OmniGroup so far is on the sidelines in the AI-integration hustle. Craft is in beta (for late November release) with some thoughtfully designed integration with Craft documents and artifacts like their “collection” figure (also a database-light concept).
This is the year OmniGroup has come alive again—first with OmniFocus 4, then with betas for a new version of OmniGraffle (one of my favorite things), and now with OmniOutliner.