While using OmniFocus fairly heavily for the past couple of days I’ve noticed two things:
I keep trying to use the circle checkbox to flag an item. Clearly this is wrong.
Very often I want to defer something to later. Usually there are multiple items I want to defer in a list.
So I put together the following images to show a feature I already wish the app had: swipe right on an action to reveal two options, one to flag and one to defer.
(Ignore the red arrow in the picture, I stitched together images from reviews and added crude ugly buttons for defer and flag just to show the idea. Also apparently pasting into here uploads images but the second is resized, sorry.)
Alternately swipe left reveals a small defer button, an orange button with a flag icon, and a compressed delete button (small red button with trash can icon). Actually thinking about it I like this better, if it would work in the real estate available.
I’m curious if this is a feature others would find useful? Or is it just me? (yes I will email the idea to support)
Thanks! I took another crack at it and came up with this version. This is the one I will submit to OF support for my official request. This is how I envision swiping tasks in the app.
Swipe left to flag, defer, or delete. This actually matches the GTD-ish flow of “Do, Defer, Delete” and I think these represent the vast majority of what we would do when interacting with a list of notes – I do the first two mostly, far less the second two. This also seems to match Omni’s philosophy behind the software of using defer to set start dates and flag to show intention to complete on a given day. Obviously Omni can come up with much better icons! :)
Pressing the flag icon closes the swipe and flags the task orange. Pressing the delete icon simply deletes the task. When Defer is pressed the defer dialog slides up from the bottom of the screen – see image below. I’m assuming it could be made more compact, this is just a copy/paste from the previous image. As before, ignore the red arrow, that was part of the image I snagged it from.
Note: in this one I swapped the first two icons to see how it looked – I defer a lot more than flag, not sure about anybody else.
Putting these three common commands together on the left-swipe also leaves the right-swipe available for future expansion. This greatly increases the feature density available directly from the list view.
Finally got back into my e-mail and sent this to support a few minutes ago. If you are interested in this feature e-mail them to let them know. I heard back from one of their support managers on an earlier request and he specifically said they prioritize development based on customer demand as voiced through the number of e-mails to their support box on the issue. So if you want to see it let them know! :)
