Frustrations with OF2

Misery loves company

Indeed, but numbers matter, particularly when sales are involved, so Iā€™ll add another +1 voice. The goal of making OF easier to use is understandable, but I do not personally think that the approach taken was beneficial.

One of the greatest selling features for OmniFocus 1 for me was how powerful it was. Yes, it was tough to setup and finally find a good rhythm. Yes, it took longer to get used to compared to Things. However, I can do things at scale in OF 1 that are simply not possible in a simpler product.

The trouble with OF 1 was that it wasnā€™t an out of the box, up and running in 60 seconds, type of application. That gave the impression of complexity, despite really being quite simple. I think the OmiFocus product across all three platforms would have been better served by taking OF 1, giving it a UI refresh, but provide better building blocks to ease the transition for new users rather than dumb the whole thing down. OF is supposed to be a professional grade project management product for many projects in many areas of responsibility, not a whimsical honey do list app. But the UI decisions in OF 2 feel like they started with that honey do list concept and then tacked on some of the features originally in OF 1 instead of the other way around.

It seems there is a sizeable portion of the user base that arenā€™t onboard with OF 2. I guess weā€™ll just have to hold out hope that positive change will come before OF 1 stops working. Although it would be really nice to have the OF 2 extensions for iOS 8 back ported to OF 1 as well as the much request review system.

// Still sticking with OF 1 on all three platforms until the future OF 2 revs donā€™t make me feel ill about chewing threw my actions.

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One-line, grossly dismissive comments are ā€¦ not appreciated. Please feel free to elaborate.

Your complaints have been addressed multiple times yet your request for change has turned into a journal of dissatisfaction. Youā€™ve been given as much information as you can have about the future of OF development yet you continue to post your dissatisfaction. It has turned from a request for change to a protest of sorts where people threaten to use different software. Feedback is important for many reasons, but to say this hasnā€™t dipped into a post of commiseration seems ā€˜ignorantā€™. No one says you canā€™t be dissatisfied but being negative to the point of bullying seems to counteract your goal. Itā€™s like the retail customers who believe the customer is always right, a saying thatā€™s taken on a context in which consumers hold no accountability for the way they behave to get what they want.

I digress, I just think your point has been made and it was becoming tiresome to read. I dislike negativity in all capacities when itā€™s overdone, no matter how well articulated it may be. I hope they hear your requests and make the changes you desire.

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I fully respect and can agree with some of your sentiments in the now longer presentation. The shorter version left something serious to be desired.

I have no interest to lead chanting charges of dismay, invoke ongoing responses of bellicose belligerence, or belabor concerns beyond rational reasoning. I hope to dissuade that I am a leader of any such approaches here. As you noted, my concerns have been raised, perhaps ad nauseum depending on perspective. Whether they have been addressed is also left as a matter of perspective. I am making due with the limitations I find, hoping as well that my requests reach appropriately-placed ears, looking forward to seeing them answered in what comes next, and otherwise not holding my breath in either giddy anticipation or solomon remorse.

End of story.

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I had to mod a post in this thread. If the author removes the personal attack, the post will automatically be re-shown.

Reminder: discussing and being critical of ideas and posts is fine - doing so to another visitor is not.

Unfortunately, Iā€™ve got to add my hat to the group returning to OF1. Four months on, I feel like Iā€™ve given OF2 a fair shot, but ultimately for my workflow things either take longer in OF2 than OF1, or are simply not there anymore. Tabbing through Quick Entry is broken, layout / formatting options are missing, search is limited to selected project or context, and scrolling through the task list is simply slower than in OF1. In all, it is harder to Get Things Done in OF2 than OF1. Like most here, Iā€™ve invested a lot of time and money in OmniFocus across multiple platforms so I would hate to have to look elsewhere, but I am frustrated with the lack of updates to bring OF2 at least up to where OF1 has been for quite a while.

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Sorry, but the integration with Mail app is just not satisfactory. Try adding a taks from an email in a longer thread in threaded view, and you see what I am talking about. I will start migrating (and gradually stop using OF) to Things where this integration works much, much better.

Iā€™m fairly frustrated as well. At this point, Iā€™m still waiting on some showstopper bugs before jumping into OF2. I have it installed alongside OF1 and at this point Iā€™ve been unable to start using it full time.

That said, OF1 still works and I think thereā€™s more than enough good will generated by the good folks at Omni to be patient and see where things end up. After all, weā€™re only 3 minor revisions from 2.0, so this is still a very new product and changes are a lot harder to make than it seems from the outside.

That said, if the situation still looks like this a year out from the 2.0 release, Iā€™m going to have to start shopping around for alternatives. Eventually OS upgrades will obsolete OF1.

Thanks to the OP for posting this and also for a detailed list of list of items that need some attention.

I too went back to OF1 after a intensive month of using 2 when in came out in June. I just checked in again on 2.0.3 and see nothing new in it at all to make me want to install it again.

The main ā€œnewā€ features in 2, review and forecast, were already in the iPad version, so when I started using 2, I discovered it added nothing to my work flow, but instead the problems with the interface got in the way of keeping a good workflow.

The interface sure is pretty for all of the first 5 minutes , but eventually you have to keep using it and realize how clunky it is.

What it boils down to for me is: the inability to weed out distractions and to focus on just the items you need makes it functionally inferior to OF1. The washed out look makes it hard to find what you need. The removal of ability to customize it means I canā€™t get back to that simple screen.

The essence of GTD is radical focus on the next action in a trusted system that will always produce the proper next actions. You need a simple interface to present that, with complexity in the setup and under the hood to produce those actions at the right time and place(context). Its face should be as plain as its brain is big. I think 2 fails at that.

I appreciate what Brian said above:

our assumption was that the folks who preferred v1 would stick with that
version until we added whatever features they needed, then upgrade at
that point.

So, I will check in again next year and see if there are any new features and restoration of previously working features that make it worth paying for an upgrade.

Dear Omnigroup-team,

Iā€™m not sure what are you trying to achieve. Have you actually read the comments both on the forums and on the Mac AppStore? I donā€™t think so.

And thatā€™s exactly the point. You say you hear us, but in reality you donā€™t. At least thatā€™s how many people are feeling right now.

Letā€™s take one example:

In Things you can manually sort stuff that happens on a day, regardless of the ā€œcontextā€ and due times. In Omnifocus itā€™s impossible. Another option thatā€™s still missing is a ā€œsomedayā€-task. Furthermore you canā€™t set up reminders that will be marked ā€œcompletedā€ regardless if you actually finished your task or not. So if you set up a daily ā€œtake a walkā€-reminder and donā€™t mark it complete manually, it will accumulate and pop up the next day twice.

All we hear is ā€œWe think about it, but donā€™t expect this feature to be introducedā€.

Youā€™re still the most expensive application on the market so why donā€™t you deliver?

Dear @katz, what is precisely keeping You from using the task manager that has all Your features mentioned in Your post? What exactly is the point of forcing the Omni group to implement everything that You have in Things? The concepts are not combinable for a reason.

In my opinion the two companies behind these apps are at the top of the market exactly because they are not implementing everything without consideration, only to please the shouting masses.
Heck, there actually is even a solution for the ones that want it all. It is called 2do, do check it out, please. It has priorities, GTD features, custom alerts galore and all the bells and whistles you could think of. Just donā€™t expect two things: more oversight because of more features and fast syncing ;-)

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Another frustration: if you set up a repeating task and delete it, it deletes all future versions without confirming. You must remember to mark the task as complete before deleting it, or it goes away forever.

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My thought here is to give Loyal and (given a few of the eccentricities of OF 1, what I would call) Power Users a heads-up. Of course hindsight is 20-20. But if we were given a list of missing features/functionality with the express advice to wait on an upgrade until a shakedown period to possibly add things back in, that mightā€™ve helped. For me, I am so loyal to OF and so reliant upon it, when I heard ā€œnew for Macā€, I did what you hoped Iā€™d do: I jumped at the chance ASAP. One never goes into this sort of an upgrade (especially with a product as good as OF and, presumably, a crack development team behind it) thinking, ā€œSome major things will either be missing-in-action or unhelpful in their shiny new outfits.ā€

Would it be possible within the basic app, to simply makes some of these functions a Preferences Toggle for Power Users? The biggest deal for me is the inability to paste in the Notes section. Looming almost as large is the inability to view INBOX in the same pane as Projects (the old Library View was, IMHO, a big deal).

Anyway, thanks for letting me chime in.

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I switched from Things for a reason (-:

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I can totally sympathize with that ;-)ā€¦ it was the same route for me - and back/ forth since then in irregular periods, ALWAYS ending up with being so happy using OF and cursing the malinvestment of time used for switching- I am calming myself by seeing it as a thorough review of projects ;-)))ā€¦

While I agree that some ideas in Things are solved better (scheduling, sometimes tags, manual sorting of tasks) I donā€™t see a reason for putting this into Omnigroups faces as a complaint of the nature You posted. Everything in OF is there for a reason- while we can differ on opinions whether solutions are good or bad there is no point in putting out the blame for not emulating things- do You know what I mean?

I agree. There were some things that were nice with Things. Things seems to have a structure that makes it easier for beginners to use it. It already has pre-built ā€˜perspectivesā€™ or Focus. I have to create custom perspectives to duplicate some of the default lists in THings.

To replicate this in OmniFocus 2, youā€™d need the pro upgrade to create perspectives for Today, Next, and Someday. Itā€™s not so obvious because OmniFocus is so free-form and flexible. The beginner might have to take some time tinkering with OmniFocus 2 before they can figure that out.

I have been able to replicate most of my Things workflow inside OmniFocus and I never have to use Things again. It does take some time to adjust to OmniFocus 2ā€™s style. Iā€™m guessing that most folks want the tool to bend to them and they donā€™t want to bend.

I had to adjust to the following:

Today -> Create my own Today custom perspective
Next -> Settled on a custom perspective showing all available next actions
Scheduled -> I use the Forecast perspective for this
Someday -> A custom perspective showing all ā€œOn Holdā€ projects

Areas -> I used folders to represent different Areas of Responsibility.

Active Projects -> I created a custom perspective that shows all ā€œactiveā€ projects.

There is a heavy reliance on custom perspectives to recreate the features that are built in to Things.

But I canā€™t live without OmniFocus 2ā€™s review perspective. I guess I can do a ā€œreviewā€ with Thingsā€™ Today perspective but it just felt a bit awkward for me.

I also like the freeform nature of OmniFocus. OmniFocus is not as obvious to use but I adjusted over time and learned OmniFocusā€™ design language.

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I cannot agree more- and this is actually the only feature that remains unique for OF: review. Although, considering how big reviewing is in GTD itā€™s weird NOT to see it implemented into other task managers. Having the choice, itā€™s easy to consider reviewing just another daily/weekly taskā€¦ but eventually lack of consistent review leads to neglecting the uncomfortable projects. It is those moments of repentance that lead back to the wonderfully flexible review system implemented into OF. It sort of give the extra bonus feeling of having real oversight and control- after overcoming the resistance to do the review, that is ;-)

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I guess reviewing should be an obvious part of any workflow. If I donā€™t review my carā€™s physical state, I run the risk on my car breaking down in the middle of rush hour traffic. If I donā€™t review my notes before a meeting, my presentation will fail.

The most unique thing Iā€™ve gained from OmniFocus is that I can set different review cycles for different projects. Some projects need to be reviewed only once a month. Others can be set to once every two weeks. And some projects needs to be reviewed on a weekly basis. I used to take at least two hours running through each project. Nowadays, I just do a daily review and I just review anywhere from one to eight projects at a time.

I do miss Thingsā€™ design language. It is more drag and drop while OmniFocus makes heavy use of the inspector.

For example, if I want to make a project active in Things, I can drag a project to the Active projects section. I can make it a someday project by dragging it to the Someday section.

In OmniFocus, I use the inspector to change the project status to Active. To change it to a Someday project, I use the inspector and set the project status to On Hold.

Itā€™s just learning the OmniFocus design language that becomes an initial obstacle. But once you learn to use the inspector to do everything, youā€™ll get the hang of it. But you can drag and drop projects between folders and move tasks to different projects. So I guess that helps.

Besides review, the ability to create custom perspectives to manipulate your lists are a major advantage in OmniFocus. I canā€™t do this in Things. Iā€™m limited to the pre-built views.

In OmniFocus, I can create a perspective that shows all the Home projects that are on hold. I can create another perspective that shows all the Office projects with a Mac context. Itā€™s just uniquely powerful.

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Iā€™ve done the Things - OmniFocus switch more times than Iā€™m going to admit. There are aspects of both programs that drive me a little nuts. Things is much more elegant, drag and drop works well, and search works like I would expect a search function to work. But the killer feature that Things lacks that OmniFocus does is nested tasks (and projects, folders, and contexts). Right now I have 391 projects in my database, OmniFocus can handle that better, Things is just a giant list. And the built in review feature of OF gives me a chance to be current.

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