I’m running into something that just started happening in 2.7
I have several custom perspectives set up so I can do my review like it used to work in OF 1. The work-around is to use custom perspectives, painful compared to 1.0 system, but it’s been working. I have a perspective to show me pending projects, one for active, one for stalled, one for on-hold and one for remaining. I use the shortcut command shift R to mark the items reviewed. What used to happen is I would select a project and when I was done reviewing it I could use the shortcut to mark it reviewed. It would jump to the next location for review but the display would stay where I was so I could easily continue down the list. Now when I do that the display jumps to the bottom or the location when it moves the item being reviewed to and leaves the item highlighted. I have to scroll back to the top of the list to get back to where I was working!
This means that I can no longer quickly go down the list in sequence of what is due for review!
I can’t figure out how to fix this serious bug. There has got to be a way to get it back to working properly!
Thank you for sharing your experience and feedback with us. We fixed a bug for 2.7 noted in the release notes as: Scrolling — Fixed some problems with scrolling long lists in response to various user actions. Unfortunately, it sounds like it had some undesirable consequences for you. Sorry about the unintended interruption.
The previous behavior where we did not scroll immediately when dates were updated, which some users reported as a bug, was something other users rely on. Sorry that this change wasn’t a positive impact for you in the way we intended.
To restore the old behavior, you could go back to the last version of OmniFocus 2.6.2 which does not have the bug fix for scrolling, or alternatively you can use other criteria besides next review in the perspective, in which case an update to the review date will not update the order of the items. I realize that might defeat the entire purpose of your perspective. Hopefully one of these options can make the change less painful in the short term.
If you have specific feedback beyond this change disrupting your review process which I did officially report, need help to go back to 2.6.2 or you just want to make a request for what you’d like to see in the future, drop us a line at omnifocus@omnigroup.com.
You could just fix the whole reason I had to make custom perspective in the first place. In Omni 1 there was an option to use a selection to set which type of project you were reviewing. That was taken away in the move to 2. Omni support are the ones that told me to set up the perspectives the way I have them to work around the bug introduced in 2.0 and now your fix won’t work due to another revision!
So yes, I need to either know how to get back to 2.6.2 or how to set up something in 2.7 so that it works properly. At the very least make this new illogical scrolling behavior a choice!
OK A bit more work on what would make the system much better and eliminate the need for the custom perspectives I have been using that are now broken.
The OF review system presents items that are either due or past due for review one at a time. One problem with this approach is that if you can’t do your review on the same day then items may not show up when you review. You also see items willy nilly with no structure in terms of those that are active vs on hold vs pending vs stalled. In my world knowing whether I can start a new project depends in large part on what the workload is with my current projects. I really need first to see any projects that are stalled without actions because clearly I was working so fast that I need to either do more planning or mark that project complete. That will clear out a lot of stuff each week.
Next I need to see what is coming up, the pending projects, in part because I often have things that are tickled and are critical in timing and that will affect what I can do during the next week. For example Once we give the first vaccination to the new lambs the second one must be done a certain number of days after the first with a very short window (typically 2-3 days max, depends on the drug used) for completion. When I need to weigh the sheep for EBV calculations I have a window and they must be a specific age with a very short range. Even a single day late or a day early makes the data invalid and unusable. Given that farming is weather dependent I need to know the time critical items clearly so that within the window for the task I can combine with the weather report and get the job done on time and effectively. You can’t vaccinate wet sheep for example. Then I need to see the menu of all my current active projects. Lastly the on-hold items are those that I’d like to be working on but I may not be able to unless I have space and time to do so. Reviewing them last only makes sense as I can then judge whether I can actually work on that or not.
So a perspective for review that shows all the items in a list by review date gives a much better overall view of your projects. It also needs to be able to be selected to show only those items that are of a specific status. When you are working in that review it makes absolutely no sense that when you select a project, mark it reviewed that the selection still stays in place and thus jumps you and your entire system down to the bottom of the list.
So what I’d like to see is an option like a review and next where when you have a list set up with all the items by both the status and the dates that the projects are due for review, (today, this week, this month etc.). The you could use a different shortcut that would mark the current project reviewed, move it to the bottom of the sorted by review time list and automatically select the next item in the list. That is basically what you had in OF 1.0 and I’ve been struggling to get that same behavior in 2.0 since it came out. I tried the clean up changed items when changing perspective instead of immediately but it doesn’t fix the problem.
I’d suggest adding a preference for reviews that gives options on how you want to see the review option work, how it’s sorted and the scrolling behavior or not. That would allow everyone to pick the way that makes sense for them and their system rather than changing it on a whim and breaking previously working procedures.
