Hey, Wondering if anyone has found a practical way to get Claude Cowork to read from OmniFocus - without using MCP, which isn’t an option for me due to work restrictions. My understanding is that OF is not a readable database.
I want Claude to have visibility of my actual tasks and projects when helping me plan, prioritise, or draft work, rather than me having to describe everything from scratch each time.
Thanks!
Try this. Copies your OmniFocus database to the clipboard. Inside the plugin you’ll find a note export size limit of 200 characters.
Use the following instructions to tell your LLM about the format. I‘ve minimized it to use as few tokens as possible. Your AI will get everything, but won’t be able to write back to OF. However you can ask it to output TaskPaper format. It should be able to read some existing tags from the output of the plugin. If I were you I’d prepare a prompt explaining the idea of each tag and certain things which are important to you. You could ask it to e.g. re-plan everything below a certain folder. Then you could import the result as TaskPaper and then manually replace what you had before.
I am pasting a snapshot of my OmniFocus database in a structured, minified format. Please interpret the data using the following rules:
Add a goal. Paste the plugin output below above text.
CopyForLLM.omnifocusjs (4.1 KB)
@Scg Switch to Projects view, expand all projects and tasks, select all tasks, choose Copy as Taskpaper then paste into Claude. Tell Claude you’ve pasted your OmniFocus database in taskpaper format and it should be able to make sense of it.
Do check the results before you paste though in case you store personal or financial info in your notes that you don’t want to share.
This is all well and good, but I think what we’re all looking/waiting for is an official Omnifocus MCP connector for Claude. If it takes too long, I will be switching to a different task manager even though I’d miss my beloved Omnifocus.
Yep, I’ve used the plug-in shared above (which Claude modified to include some additional metadata), but it’s a patch rather than a fix. The leaps in productivity are so vast that’s it’s going to be impossible to justify using a task manager without ai integration, no matter how much I love the product. @kcase , is there anything in the works?
Adding my voice to this request.
Actually, even better than MCP integration would be a Claude Connector that is plug-and-play.
Any solution that involves copy-and-paste is not going to work.
@kcase - Would love to hear from you directly on this.
Is there any update from @kcase or anyone else at Omni group?
I’m interested to see what Apple unveil at WWDC this year. They could announce their own MCP like orchestrator that can harness all the intents of the installed apps. I’m hoping they can pull off something like this with decent control, constraints and security rather than just a less awful Siri powered by Google.
@kcase and Omni team are normally quite open and transparant on the general direction an app like Omnifocus is developing. Why is there no reaction to this thread at all?
Why can’t they just state their ideas on Claud or MCPs.. At least we then know not to leave Omnifocus.
For me it now feels like software with stalled development and I contemplate for the first time in many years to switch to apps like Todoist
Agreed. What would really help is a rough timeline, even a loose one. Is MCP or Claude integration something we might see this year, next year, or not on the roadmap at all? Without that, the silence starts to look like a strategic position rather than a busy week, and people will draw their own conclusions and start testing alternatives. I’d rather not, but I’ve also started looking at Todoist for the first time in years. @kcase
I recommend that everyone reading this post send email to omnifocus@omnigroup.com to request that OmniGroup provide some sort of integration with Claude.
The list of Connectors in Claude’s settings is multiplying daily as forward-thinking software companies realize that importance of providing this capability to their customers. I see a day when I and many others will no longer be interested in using software that does not provide this capability.
Sorry for the delayed response here! (I answered a similar question on Slack that was also asked back in March, but I didn’t see that this thread was asking something similar. I assumed folks in this thread were talking about existing approaches to integrating with Claude.)
I believe that MCP is a modern, cross-platform corollary to the Mac ecosystem’s AppleScript dictionaries. It’s a great standard for discovering API endpoints and calling them in a standard way. (And as a bonus, it doesn’t involve keeping track of four-byte codes.)
Because it’s associated with the AI buzz, lots of developers are integrating it. But it’s not limited to and doesn’t have to be used with AI; there’s a great opportunity to make it easy for humans to script all those apps too.
So I’m happy to see more and more apps add support for MCP, and of course we plan to support MCP in our apps at Omni as well. (Just as we’ve supported AppleScript automation, URL automation, Workflow automation, JavaScript automation, Shortcuts automation, and App Intents automation.)
I’m really curious to see what Apple plans for OS 27. All of the OmniFocus App Intents that we built for Shortcuts are also designed for use by AI systems. Apple’s previously-announced roadmap calls for those App Intents to be integrated with Apple Intelligence and Siri in a much deeper way than the current Siri integration. But a lot has changed since they announced those plans, and I could imagine them building an MCP server or CLI into the system that would automatically expose those intents for any model to use, rather than only exposing it to Siri. (In fact, I specifically suggested this at last year’s WWDC.)
Of course, Omni Automation provides an even richer JavaScript API with documented classes and methods that the latest LLMs have already demonstrated they’re pretty good at using. So one could also imagine exposing that through a CLI and having a result that’s even more powerful and efficient.
We’re now two weeks from this year’s WWDC, when we’ll get our first peek at what Apple has been working on over the past year and plans to ship in OS 27. That said, to be clear, we won’t just be hoping and waiting for Apple to solve this problem. We do want to see what they’re doing so we don’t end up doing a bunch of redundant work, but if they aren’t going to solve this soon then we will forge a solution ourselves (as we did with Omni Automation).
(We would have done so already, but with Liquid Glass, Omni Links, OmniOutliner 6, and OmniGraffle 8, we’ve had a lot of major projects on our plates this year!)
@kcase Thanks for your reply Ken. Now that WWDC is here, any updated thoughts?
While I’m sure some here will disagree, I’m guessing that an increasing percentage of OF users will be wanting/needing/demanding that their software tools integrate with AI in one way or another. Regardless of what Apple may finally deliver with Siri-AI, Anthropic is not going away and will likely remain the best option for getting serious work done.
PLEASE develop a connector/MCP.
