A few questions about perspectives

OmniFocus OmniFocus for Mac
#1

  1. In the perspective options…what is the difference between “Focus” and “Sidebar Selection”? They seem redundant to me.

  2. Will the option to “Focus” a context based perspective include the option to have the focus affect the sidebar items as well? What I mean is, if I have a parent Work context…I would prefer all contexts outside of this to be hidden when I focus on the work context. Hope I’m explaining that right.

  3. Are project based perspectives coming to IOS (iPhone) anytime soon? Or are we still a ways off. I find that I now tend to avoid using project based perspectives on the desktop because I know they won’t be available to me during my commute or while I’m in my PC based workplace.

Keep up the great work.

#2

Step back from perspectives for a moment. Select a sidebar item (perhaps a folder) in Projects, and choose “Focus on [your folder name]” from the View menu. You’ll see that everything outside the folder is hidden, both in the current tab, and if you switch to other tabs. So you can focus on, say, your work projects, and then look at them in Contexts, or Forecast, or your custom perspective.

#3

Hmm … if I’m in Projects, the only way I can get “Focus On” to show up in the View menu is to already have selected a specific Project. In which case, all the other Projects disappear from the main window, and the main window features only the selected project.

The only thing hitting “Focus On” seems to do is remove the list of other projects from the sidebar.

Or am I missing something?

#4

Once you focus on a specific project or folder, that focus “follows you” around the app.

For example, suppose I focus on my Work folder, then switch to the Forecast perspective. Only action inside projects within my Work folder will appear. Similarly, if I switch to the Contexts perspective, again only action inside projects within my Work folder will appear there. This is a great way to hide a subset of my projects while viewing a different perspective.

1 Like
#5

Ah, that explains it. Thank you.

Just out of curiosity, is there a reason Focus exists only for Projects, and not for Contexts?

#6

I think this distinction is just a consequence of the original design of OmniFocus 1. If you would find focusing on contexts useful personally, please send an email to OFPreview@omnigroup.com so our Support Humans can add the request to our database.

Thanks for your interest in OmniFocus 2. It really makes the hard work worthwhile to know that people are using it to accomplish their own great stuff!