Bring back the Test builds ? Speed up development?

OmniFocus OmniFocus for Mac
#1

I don’t know how to put all this into words without sounding too harsh but I’m checking the forums every day and I’m getting more and more frustrated. I don’t think I’m the only one.

It seems like the development for Omnifocus 2 for Mac has slowed to a crawl at a time when users are having more problems with it than ever.

I understand that Omni has a lot of apps to maintain and 3 different versions of omnifocus but come on… there’s a TON of complains about omnifocus 2 for Mac that aren’t being addressed. Frustrations with the inbox processing, slow performance, missed features compared with OF1 like estimates and theming, etc…

According to the forums a lot of users are going back to omnifocus 1 or looking for alternative apps, I reinstalled OF1 yesterday and OF2 feels like a regression in functionality. It looks prettier but is not as useful as before and the worst thing of it all is that we are not seeing any advances on the development of the app to improve the functionality.

On the Desktop version, the last release (2.0.3) was a month ago and according to the notes it fixed 9 bugs. Of those bugs, 80% don’t improve my experience at all (2 are related to the help pages, 3 about clipping from mail which I don’t use, and a display bug that didn’t affect me). The most important issues stay the same; performance hasn’t been improved, the Inbox issue hasn’t been addressed, and review is useless for me because I use a dropped Someday/Maybe folder that doesn’t show in Review.

The release before that was on July 21 with no visible improvements to the app either. So we have about 5 months (since 2.0.1) where there has been no visible improvements to the desktop application.

Omnifocus is expensive, over the last few years I’ve bought OF1 for mac, ipad and iphone, same thing with omnifocus 2. It’s the app in which I have invested the most and I don’t want to use something else because of that, so please, dedicate more resources to it and fix the problems that your most loyal users are complaining about.

If development is currently active on OF for Mac I would like to get the nightly/test builds back. When we had the test builds, we could at least see some constant improvement and knew that work was being made. I prefer having small incremental changes than waiting months to get a new minor release.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do love OF and apreciate Omnigroup’s work but I would like to be able to use the app daily without getting pissed at it.

EDIT: asking people to go back to OF1 is not a solution, we bought OF2 to use it.

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#2

Most hardcore users are disappointed with OF2? Users are having more problems than ever? Lots of hyperbole and anecdotal evidence, no?

I get that you’re frustrated, but just because the bug fixes in the last build don’t impact you specifically doesn’t mean that those fixes aren’t needed. Likewise, just because you don’t see changes happening right in front of you doesn’t mean that changes aren’t happening at all. To quote Omni Group from the OmniFocus 2 page in the Mac App Store:

In other words, bigger changes are coming, but patience is important.

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#3

yes, quite a bit, but it’s what I’m seeing on the forums. Probably not most users but big bunch of them.

I don’t have the App store version so I haven’t seen that note there and neither have seen it on the forums. If there’s a big update getting ready that’s a good reason to enable the test builds instead of having us waiting, big releases were tested on Omnifocus 1 using the nightly builds.

#4

IMHO this is nearly worthless information. What is needed is for OmniGroup to post a page where known bugs are reported and the status to fix them is clarified. OmniGroup is not a one-man team with an Indie software app. They are a development office with a major piece of software. They repeat the “changes are coming just be patient” mantra often enough that it seems to almost to have become an equivalent to an “accept it or leave it” religion.

As for whether this is hyperbole and anecdotal evidence … Two major apps that I use daily (Zengobi - a one-man team, and Wavemetrics - a small team with a cross platform app) do absolutely better jobs at keeping their customers informed about what the heck is going on with their software development. When bug reports are posted, customers get immediate updates on when they will be addressed. We get notices with specific verbiage akin to “this will be fixed in the next release due in two week”, not the general “we hear you and thank you and will put your request on our list and have bigger changes coming” verbiage. OmniGroup keeps its customers in a tightly controlled vacuum by comparison.

This is the frustration the OP is recording, it is a real not an anecdotal message, and it certainly requires more attention than just a call back for him to find to a missing virtue (have yet even more patience)!!!

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