Linked List: January 23, 2026

Friday, 23 January 2026

Ken Case, on The Omni Group blog:

The features noted above already make for a great upgrade. But as I mentioned last year, one of the interesting problems we’ve been pondering is how best to link to documents in native apps. We’ve spent some time refining our solution to that problem, Omni Links, which are now shipping first in OmniOutliner 6. With Omni Links, we can link to content across all our devices, and we can share those links with other people and other apps.

Omni Links support everything we said document links needed to have. Omni Links work across all of Apple’s computing platforms and can be shared with a team. They leverage existing solutions for syncing and sharing documents, such as iCloud Drive or shared Git repositories. They are easy to create, easy to use, and easy to share.

Omni Links also power up Omni Automation, giving scripts and plug-ins a way to reference and update content in linked documents — documents that can be shared across all your team’s devices.

There’s lots more in version 6, including a modernized UI, and many additions to Omni Automation, Omni’s scripting platform that works across both Mac and iOS — including really useful integration with Apple’s on-device Foundation Models, with, of course, comprehensive (and comprehensible) documentation.

It’s Omni Links, though, that strikes me as the most interesting new feature. The two fundamental models for apps are library-based (like Apple Notes) and document-based (like TextEdit). Document-based apps create and open files from the file system. Library-based apps create items in a database, and the location of the database in the file system is an implementation detail the user shouldn’t worry about.

OmniOutliner has always been document-based, and version 6 continues to be. There are advantages and disadvantages to both models, but one of the advantages to library-based apps is that they more easily allow the developer to create custom URL schemes to link to items in the app’s library. Omni Links is an ambitious solution to bring that to document-based apps. Omni Links let you copy URLs that link not just to an OmniOutliner document, but to any specific row within an OmniOutliner document. And you can paste those URLs into any app you want (like, say, Apple Notes or Things, or events in your calendar app). From the perspective of other apps, they’re just URLs that start with omnioutliner://. They’re not based on anything as simplistic as a file’s pathname. They’re a robust way to link to a unique document, or a specific row within that document. Create an Omni Link on your Mac, and that link will work on your iPhone or iPad too — or vice versa. This is a very complex problem to solve, but Omni Links delivers on the age-old promise of “It just works”, abstracting all the complexity.

I’ve been using OmniOutliner for at least two decades now, and Omni Links strikes me as one of the best features they’ve ever added. It’s a way to connect your outlines, and the content within your outlines, to any app that accepts links. The other big change is that OmniOutliner 6 is now a single universal purchase giving you access to the same features on Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Vision.

Lolgato 1.7 ★

Free Mac utility by Zendit Oy:

A macOS app that enhances control over Elgato lights, offering features beyond the standard Elgato Control Center software.

Features:

Automatically turn lights on and off based on camera activity

Turn lights off when locking your Mac

Sync light temperature with macOS Night Shift

Lolgato also lets you set global hotkeys for toggling the lights and changing their brightness.

I’ve had a pair of Elgato Key Lights down at my podcast recording desk for years now. Elgato’s shitty software drove me nuts. Nothing seemed to work so I gave up on controlling my lights from software. I set the color temperature and brightness the way I wanted it (which you have to do via software) and then after that, I just turned them off and on using the physical switches on the lights.

I forget how I discovered Lolgato, but I installed back on November 10. I connected Lolgato to my lights, and set it to turn them on whenever the Mac wakes up, and off whenever the Mac goes to sleep. It has worked perfectly for over two months. Perfect little utility.

Playing the Percentages ★

Dr. Drang:

For weeks — maybe months, time has been hard to judge this past year — Trump has been telling us that he’s worked out deals with pharmaceutical companies to lower their prices by several hundred percent. Commentators and comedians have pointed out that you can’t reduce prices more than 100% and pretty much left it at that, suggesting that Trump’s impossible numbers are due to ignorance.

Don’t get me wrong. Trump’s ignorance is nearly limitless — but only nearly. I’ve always thought that he knew the right way to calculate a price drop; he did it the wrong way so he could quote a bigger number. And that came out in yesterday’s speech.

Trump sophistry + math pedantry = Daring Fireball catnip.