@mtrifiro Yeah I was surprised to the negativity as well. I have used a well known calendar app for many years that has natural language input and I fail to see why OF doesn’t consider it as an option for it’s many diverse customers.
Other todo apps have varying forms of natural language input so it is perfectly possible for it to be implemented in OF.
I would imagine this matter must be on the minds of the good folks at Omni, and possibly in a new version of OF, implement natural language input as a switchable option.
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You are misunderstanding what is said. If you take a look at your screenshot you can easily see that it it is hiding 6 fields. What you see are icons and that’s it. It requires familiarity with the application in order to know what those icons mean and why 2 of them are actually greyed out. You also have no idea what kind of data you can enter: date (with a datepicker or by typing), numbers, text, something else?
From the looks of it you can probably expand that dialog to actually show you all those details. For a lot of people seeing the field name and what kind of value they can enter gives them more control over things. They see it as being more precise.
You also seem to not understand what this dialog is actually for. This is a quick entry dialog that is based on the GTD principle. That means that you only enter text. The item will get saved to the inbox. At a later time you go through all those items in the inbox and process them by assigning tags, projects, dates (due, defer), etc. Not everyone works like that. Some people want to do all that when they enter the item because if they don’t they might forget.
However, the biggest misunderstanding is thinking that this has anything to do with natural language input: it doesn’t. This is about the overall user interface of the application. Again, natural language input is not going to solve the user interface issues that are discussed here. It is, however, a very neat and useful addition for quick entry of items. Use and see it as such but do not make the mistake over and over again of thinking it is a way to improve UX. If you want to hammer in a screw then by all means do just that. That still doesn’t mean it is the correct tool to use (that would be a screwdriver in this case, not all screws are meant to be hammered in).
And lastly, if you want to use natural language input with OmniFocus then you can already do so with Siri. Very strange that people keep going on and on about the natural language input while OmniFocus has had this since OmniFocus 2! Try this article: Collecting with Siri in OmniFocus with Reminders Capture. As you can see things have improved greatly since iOS 11.
I also would like the option to parse text. I’m at university, and so the beginning of a semester is a major time–suck entering in dozens of simple actions that only need a name and due date, and assigned a class. Something like Assignment #1 due Apr 6th #EMGT2050 would be great.
This is only a personal reflection, but a couple people mentioned animosity and @steve28 I’m sure this wasn’t your intention, but I think that part of the tone of this thread was influenced by title. Without any context, “are we all just pretending Natural Language input is not a thing?” is a confrontation more than a feature request, and it’s easily read as a challenge to, or a criticism of, all the staff and users on the forum. Maybe that was part of where people were coming from with their responses?
I’d like to keep hearing about the feature request itself, and how it would work and the issues to its implementation that people have raised. I’m going to send in a feature request too, but the feedback so far has already explicated what it is I’d actually like to see.
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Assuming you have the data in a parseable format you could easily generate TaskPaper for that - which would be extremely fast.
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I read a bunch of Task manager comparisons to decide which ones to give a try and use to organize everything, and Natural Language input on Todoist is mentioned as a big strength on every single review, comparison, analysis you can find. How is there even a question if it’s valuable or not with such huge agreement that it is?
“Aaah! I don’t need these shortcuts! And the way I use OF is how it is really supposed to be used!”.
Good for you. But you want OF to be a successful app and Omni to be a successful company, no? Looking at market share, and the reason people put behind their choices, it’s obvious that this kind of feature (However you wanna call it) is valuable. Specially given it can only add, without subtracting anything from the current experience.
The discussion went into:
“This is not really Natural Language, you are calling it wrong.” Who cares? Call it whatever you want, the feature and how it works is pretty clear to everyone.
“Todoist has bad UI, it hides the fields!” Who cares? We are not saying we should have the same UI, just the feature, OF can do a better UI.
“Just use Siri!”. Yup. “Siri, create a task in Omnifocus to unclog the toilet this weekend”, at a mexican restaurant. Exactly the same feature.
“+1. I want to do X”. “You can solve X with a script.”,“You can solve X using these other apps in simple 10 steps”. Sure. With enough automation and with the help of other apps everything is possible. That is not the point.
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I’m pretty sure if Siri were smart she’d correct that to set an IMMEDIATE reminder. C’MON.
Turing Test, anyone? (There are days I fail it, too.) :-)
Increasing the ease of capture seems very unlikely to be a good idea:
- Reducing the number of battles you pick is always more productive than multiplying them.
- If you really do want to capture and pursue some minor detour - then pausing to reflect and reformulate it clearly will at least improve its quality, relevance, connection to context, and level of digestion.
(With any luck it will persuade you to refile it in the bin, which is the much most productive place for most of these things).
Natural language input is bound to be a recipe for clogging all kinds of things with poorly digested material.
(Better to focus on deletion, and if anything remains, on slower and more careful reformulation)
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Disagree, but you may have a point for complex tasks and projects. For simple ones, natural language is the best for me.
