While on Mac, I can set my Flagged perspectives to show ONLY available tasks, same is not valid on the iPhone where this setting is not respected and all tasks with no deferred that will show on that perspective. Annoying.
Not quite the same thing, don’t get me wrong, but have you tried making a “flagged and available” perspective on the mac and then pinning it to the home screen on the phone?
No, it wouldn’t make sense to pin the perspective on the iPhone as there will always be a “Flagged” in there.
My point is: that fixed-flagged-perspective-on-iphone does not (necessarily) reflect your actual Flagged perspective.
Making it so, would just make sense… no? :D
As much as I hate the “me too, bumped” sort of replies, me too. It’s actually quite a nit and distraction for me.
I have a project with 12 subtasks. I’ve flagged the project as one of my MITs for the day. On Desktop and iPad-Pro (after adjusting to “Available”) it works great. I see the one thing I’m supposed to do right now. But on iPhone I have a Flagged view with 13 tasks in it (including the project), most of which are grayed out.
The problem is now I’ve lost that “only one thing at a time” secret sauce that OF/GTD is so good at.
And not to be a jerk, but it’s kind of the only thing that OF is really, really good at. The rest of the stuff is just commodity task management, with a UI and model suffering from years of legacy and the need to maintain backwards database compatibility.
The truth is that if I didn’t want the complex blocking/sequential/parallel/etc. project and subtask features, there are any number of other task systems with feature parity and usually with a more intuitive interface. And all of those features come down to expressing what should be hidden. Not hiding according to these rules is a pretty gross error, IMO.
Really feel like OmniGroup has missed the boat in a major way on this one by not preserving the core differentiating functionality of the product.
So yeah, workaround is to duplicate the desktop flagged view as flagged/available in a custom perspective, but man, can’t express how annoying it is that I can’t use the default option in the same way it works on Desktop, especially since it can’t be hidden. And I’m not sure that workaround even works on non-pro iPad, since it can’t use custom perspectives. If that “View” button isn’t there with non-pro, iPad users are just outright screwed.
It’s so incredibly jarring having to do things in different ways based on different environments that it undercuts the value of buying an ecosystem. I might as well be using one of the generic todo managers synced to ToodleDo, if I’m going to have to remember to switch flows on a per-client basis.
I’ve implied as much in other threads, but the number one thing OmniGroup could do to increase my customer satisfaction is to actually align the different versions so I can function without having to excuse and ignore bumps, bruises, and papercuts.
I actually stray off to competitor’s systems every few months because of this issue. So far, I keep coming back for the project dependency tools, but someday…
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What’s odd here as well is that it doesn’t seem like it would even be that complicated of a thing for OmniFocus to add the “View” option to the top of “Flagged” in much the same way as they have done other sections (Projects, Contexts, Perspectives, etc).
I remember this debate raging a couple of years back on how items should be sorted in contexts – by project or with due date & flagged at the top, especially after the default behaviour had changed a couple of times across versions. The solution was simply to actually give users the option on the “View” menu.
I can see the exact same thing applying here… Some people might want “Flagged” to show everything, regardless of availability, while others might only want available tasks. The functionality is in fact already there on the View menu for other views, so it seems like it shouldn’t be a major thing from a UI point of view to simply bring that menu to the built-in “Flagged” view.
Personally, I simply never use the built-in “Flagged” view, or even the others, as it’s all custom perspectives for me – my choice would be some way of turning those off, or at least moving my pinned custom perspectives to appear above them. Of course, not everybody is a “Pro” version user.
Hi Guy’s. I also have a Perspective setup that is supposed to show just stuff that is waiting on hold. It is fine on my iPad OmniFocus 2 Pro and on my Mac OmniFocus v2 Pro. But my iPhone version of OmniFocus shows way too many tasks. There should be no difference in the perspectives. Hello Omni Humans, can we comment on this issues? I’m just wondering if this is a known issue to Omnigroup. Thanks!
We’re adding Flagged view options to the iPhone app. Currently slated for v2.5.
I believe that any inconsistencies in custom perspectives are likely to be fixed by changes already made for the iPhone app’s v2.4, but if not it will definitely be fixed by changes already made for its v2.5.
We’re not fully there yet, but I hope it’s evident that we’ve been working towards that goal with all of our updates over the last year. The Mac app and iPad app are very close in functionality now (with support for creating custom perspectives having the same options in both), and the iPhone app should match the iPad app’s functionality in v2.5.
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That’s really excellent news, re: 2.5 on iPhone. The iPad version was a pleasant surprise for me in terms of just how much desktop functionality is supported.
Really good news, @kcase. Thanks for sharing.
Hope the forecast badge will be consistent across versions as well :D
Im no programmer but why can’t the dev team just make all features available on all devices. It seems a lot of people INCLUDING MYSELF like things about the Mac app for instance but are disappointed when reaching for their iPhone or iPad. I’m all about consistency in my task workflow.
That’s not possible for everything (e.g., mobile devices can’t support multiple windows or AppleScript, while desktop apps don’t have access to some of mobile’s features such as displaying tasks on a map).
But it is possible for a lot of things, and it’s certainly where we’ve been headed for the last several years. For example, the Forecast and Review started out on iPad, then Forecast made its way to iPhone and Mac, and now Review has made its way to Mac and is coming to iPhone. Perspectives started out on Mac, then made their way to iPhone and iPad in a limited way, and are now fully available on iPad and will soon be fully available on iPhone as well.
But each feature takes time to build on each platform—I’m afraid it’s not something we can just copy and paste from one platform to the others! (There is a lot of underlying logic that does work that way and is identical between platforms, and that code has always been shared—which is why there are many features which have always functioned identically, such as the way deferring a project will defer all of the tasks within it.)
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Thanks for the input Ken. I completely understand, but some things are really annoying, especially because of the amount of time to have them in sync across platforms:
- Flagged perspective (topic of this thread)
- Search is one of them (iPad and iPhone)
- Forecast badge another
- The new snooze/complete interactive notifications
I completely understand and please understand my aim is in constructive criticism. Does that mean we can look forward to custom sort for Forecast, Inbox, Context, etc on the home screen of the iphone like that of the Mac and the iPad. I like the way things were set up on the old version, but I like the new color and icon look of OF2. is it possible to have an option to choose between layout styes. like choosing from the styles in the included image? (With the new OF2 look of course) I find features I don’t use being on the home screen are distracting.
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Thanks Ken.
Regarding the inconsistency in the flagged perspective between Mac and iPhone, you mention that you will be adding Flagged view options to the iPhone app. I mentioned the problem on this forum last June. As view options work currently, they would not be specific enough to address the problem, because only blocked actions are treated inconsistently, as distinct from actions that are deferred or in a project which is on hold.
Also on the Mac, the flagged perspective is grouped by context, while on the iPhone it is not.
Consistency is vital.
