Thanks. I’m building up a list of suggestions and will send them along.
Are you an Omni employee/contractor? You seem to know a lot about the development process. I would have suspected Omni has a lot of experience coding outlines and that this wouldn’t be such a big challenge.
I’m glad to hear you’re writing up your requests. They’re always receptive to feedback.
Not at all. I know about the process from being involved in the beta and having knowledge of how software is made.
They do, nearly two decades. While it is a challenge, it’s not insurmountable, given time. The outline isn’t just a plain system control (you’d be even more unhappy if it were) and requires a lot of manual drawing and animating.
Oh Dear – I hated this on the iPad. I’m so disappointed they put the inferior option on the iPhone too. I’m rethinking using OF3 now on iPhone.
Regarding collapse all, a long press on any collapse triangle with an are-you-sure dialog would do the trick for me.
OF3 for iOS has this feature. Long pressing in the disclosure triangle brings up a small pop up menu. You can expand and collapse here.
This works for projects, tags, and perspective groups (due, defer). This pop up is not yet available for action groups. I am hopeful that action groups will be collapsible soon.
The outline you see is extremely complicated and was written largely, if not entirely, from scratch.
I think we should just say things we actually know, you can’t possibly know that, unless you are an Omni employee.
I do some dabbling with an internal Filemaker database for our office, I can understand and appreciate how hard some of the most mundane items in programming can be under-appreciated.
In other words, nothing is as simple as it seems. I’m not an Omni employee but I can understand the difficulties that comes with programming. So I think @nostodnayr has some appreciation for the difficulties behind the scenes.
I’m a programmer as well, and honestly it is not that hard, we are talking about a task manager.
Programming doesn’t include just writing some lines of code. If it were “easy”, all these companies would’ve nailed it on the first try.
A text editor looks easy. What’s so hard about creating a program that allows us to write text? The philosophies of the developer(s) plays into how the program functions. Drafts 5 is essentially a text editor. But man, it’s gotta a lot of power for a “simple” text editor.
As was said above:
It’s exasperating because this decision is at odds with the philosophical approach of the app as a whole.
I’m going to guess that collapsing action groups did not get higher priority like multiple tags, batch editing, new repeat, new notifications and did not make the cut for version 3.0.
It looks like a pretty good bet that it will appear in version 3.1. It’s not in the 3.0.4 TestFlight (yet). Crossing my fingers that it makes it in the 3.0.4 cut.
There are so many features just yelling for attention that it’s hard to know which ones are louder. The Mac TestFlight and the web site sounds like it’s getting the main focus right now.
You can always e-mail ofpreview@omnnigroup.com to upvote for this feature and tell the Omni Humans that this is an important feature to include sooner rather than later.
Any news about Action Groups please? It’s a long time since this discussion and it’s happening again: Action groups still worse than useless on iOS??
Hi Jeg,
I´ve send an e-mail to Omnigroup one month ago. They reply saying that there are considering implementing this function, but most likely not this year (2020). It seems to me that this feature is definitely not a priority for them.
Really strange that this is not bothering them as it’s really the opposite of focus if all these subtasks clutter the perspective. Even Todoist fixed this now in a perfect way …
The answer I got directly from Ken Case in February was a lot more promising. He said that they were hoping to ship collapsible action groups for IOS in the next few months.
Dear Jan_H,
This sounds great to me. I am very happy for this answer and I am looking forwards to this update. Thank you.
Best Regards!
Dear Jeg,
Yes, indeed Todoist has fixed this in the last updates. One feature that Things 3 and Todoist have that I would like to see on Omnifocus would be manual-sorting for perspectives. Right now, we got this only on Custom Perspectives that are group and sorted by Tags. It would be great if we could do manual-sorting on Flags, but, at least for me, this is not as important as collapsible action groups for IOS.
Best regards
Hi Jan,
Are there any news about this topic? Would you know if they are working on this feature?
Best Regards,
Leonardo
Unsurprisingly, there is no change to action groups on iOS, and I don’t believe anyone from Omni has said anything on the topic. Nested tasks remain a near-useless feature if your primary interface to OmniFocus is through your iOS devices.
In the July 2020 road map on the blog, Ken Case did say they are taking a step back to rethink the user experience, especially the iPad and iPhone.
We will just have to wait for more news of a public beta or something soon.
