Hi Ken,
We appreciate that you took your time to address our concerns regarding Omnifocus 3. Making navigation easier is a very understandable reason to do the modifications that you mentioned. However, we think that those modifications came at the expense of the power of Omnifocus related to the ways that it handled hierarchies and dependencies.
In fact, for many of us, action groups are now meaningless, making Omnifocus 3 a task management app whose power is now matched by other apps that always had restricted approaches to hierarchies and sublevels. For us, then, Omnifocus lost some of its power and flexibility when this idea of “scroll through the whole thing and see them all in context” was implemented in its iOS app, which is more serious on the iPhone.
I have three small and simple suggestions on this question:
First, disclosure triangles´ behavior should be fast and responsive: it should collapse/expand quickly with a tap, making the navigation easier, functional and pleasurable. If we must wait a little after tapping on the triangle to display its contents and dependencies. At least for me, this function is so essential to the way that I work on Omnifocus that this small wait would be enough to disturb the way that I handle action groups and subtasks.
Summing up: make disclosure triangles behavior as responsive and fast as possible.
Second suggestion (and this would be a harder to implement): introduce a way to only see the contents of a specific action group or even two, three selected ones.
Why? Yes, you mentioned that disclosure triangles solved the issue on Mac and I agree, sure, but comparing there are significant differences here: screen size aside, we have a very powerful Focus feature on Mac that is lacking on the Ios of both Omnifocus 2 and 3.
For example: Suppose that we have a project with five action groups but we only wanted to work and view the contents of Action Group 1. On Omnifocus 2 we could do this simple by tap on it. If this is the only way to handle Action Groups, then, yes, it makes navigation harder due to multiple taps to go back and forward. But if it becomes just one more option available for those that want to focus on one specific action group? Why they need to see project´s overall content if his focus is in one specific part of it? Omnifocus 2 perfectly handles this, all the criticism about its navigation aside.
This is not an extravagant request that would go against the core ideas of the app: the name of the app is Omni ´FOCUS´, it should help us to maintain our focus on things that relevant in our present circumstance.
Last suggestion: collapse all/expand all.
Even on Mac Collapse all/Expand All is not so easy to access (we must resort to shortcuts or using its options windows) but the feature is still there, no doubt. It could be implemented on the Ios version as well. In fact, due to the screen size, it would be even more relevant.
For example: I may have a project with four action groups and each of them can have five to six tasks (a total of fifteen to twenty-four tasks). Now, it would be fantastic that we could collapse/expand all of them with a single tap.
Even OmniOutliner, an app much more related to this issue, does still not have an explicitly accessible feature of Collapse All/Expand All through the main outline view.
Omnifocus 3 is an app with fantastic new features and improvements: Omnigroup should be proud of all the work. But there is also significant room for more improvements and we think that Action Group is one of them. I am satisfied that you, Ken and the Omnigroup staff, is considering our concerns. Omnifocus is a fundamental part of our workflow and we expect that it continues to be so, but right now, at least for me, I cannot use efficiently your app because of the mentioned restrictions. I am expecting this to solved so I can embrace Omnifocus 3.
