Nick,
Fantastic script. Thank you for sharing and spending time on writing up a README for your solution. I appreciate it.
Cheers,
Horst
The way that Things handles tags is spot on…
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And for the record, I’ve used every version of Omnifocus since the first Alpha on the Mac and much as I love it, I still dearly wish it had tags every time I use it… :-(
I hope OmniFocus will add tags. Tags are a modern software innovation; they are very intuitive and simple. Apple’s application of tags in OS X Mavericks and Yosemite is a good example of how to do it well.
I suspect that if David Allen ever writes a new edition of Getting Things Done that includes a computer/smartphone-based GTD system, he will look favorably toward tags.
I love OmniFocus and have used it for over eight years. I also like tags a lot. I have been investigating other productivity apps, many of which use tags. None of the competing options are as good as OmniFocus. The question is which will happen first: one of the competing options gets good enough, or OmniFocus adds tags. I know that if Omni adds tags to OmniFocus, it will be done extremely well and elegantly.
Just for the record, David Allen is writing on the new version of GTD
He was talking about it in a very very helpful podcast on MPU-
and he explicitly despises tags!
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Nothing like trying a new app to make one do a proper review and drop a load of dead projects eh?
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I know exactly what you mean. I am at my least productive when a new version of something like Omnifocus hits…gotta play with it for a while :)
Joking aside though, the whole tags debate could be resolved in a heartbeat by the Omni team making it a toggle-on/off feature in settings. Whatever your preferences on the matter, they’d have you covered.
For the record, I have actually stopped using omnifocus entirely over this issue; happily using 2do, tagging whatever I need.
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I have to agree with RiK on the whole tags thing. It seems to me that
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yes - Cultured Codes Things does a good job of providing tagging functionality that the user can take or leave as appropriate to the way they work.
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Strict David Allen style GTD vs it’s various spin-offs such as Priacta’s TRO (which I persoanlly find more useful and better supports my needs) shouldn’t to be elevated to the status of a religious debate - but OF’s present policy of strict adherence to David Allen’s specific methodology is a frustratingingly dogmatic position to take - as a user it feels like I am having someone else’s “way of doing things” rammed down my throat. It’s uncomfortable.
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I don’t really understand it from a software engineering perspective either - certainly it seems there are more than enough users desirous of the feature to make the story valid. Implementing the code should be relatively trivial. And as has been pointed out- the feature could be made entirely optional. So it seems to me the value proposition is there. I for one abandoned OF1 for CC Things over the lack of tagging support. I would turn back to OF2 (or 3) in a heartbeat, though, if that functionality were added and as long as the bulk of my old OF1 applescripts still worked.
I loved OF1 for it’s applescript-ability. It made it very easy to tie things together - using like evernote and devonthink as filing respoitories for project information. I miss the variety of useful scripts available for OF and other productivity tools.
I also liked the ability to customise the appearance of OF1 so heavily - especilliy in terms of color schemes. I am a complete “Solarized” convert, and try to get at the very least a “dark look” scheme for just about every app on my mac. I spend a lot of my work day staring at the screen, so anything that reduces eye strain and the glare of white on the screen is a good thing. I have only used the the beta versions of OF2, though, so perhaps the release versions permit this nowadays.
But number one - top of my OF wishlist is still tagging.
I do hope that a future version of OF will open up this one “optional extra”. It would win my custom back from CC Things.
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To me, Omnifocus has so much more to offer than Things regarding productivity that I would never think of going back (I used Things before), even if I miss the tags. But there is no dogmatic position, there are just sync compatibility issues. Tags, or something similar, will be coming, as Ken Case explains in this post:
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Nothing is as easy it seems. If tags are implemented, that will most likely create a cascading ripple effect that changes everything.
I don’t doubt that tags will be coming. Up to this point, OmniFOcus has been more about changing the user interface and slowly updating three platforms (updating the Mac, iPhone, and iPad apps up to near-equal feature specs). Then hopefully we’ll be getting that much talked about push syncing to bring almost instantaneous updating.
The last thing to come out would be features that will change the database structure. When the database structure gets changed, that’s when we’ll probably see tags.
Despite the lack of tags, I just can’t go back to Things.
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I have not seen a single reason in the thread why there shouldn’t / couldn’t be tags.
- There is no complexity if you don’t use tags. Keep it turned off by default, warn people, etc. Software is for all users and how one user group uses the app should not affect the other user group.
- There is no issue with compatibility. It is just one more column to the database. Applications migrate databases all the time. The application could either leave the old tasks without tags or give them ‘no-tag’ tag like the ‘no context’ context. Let the user decide when they try to tag the first item.
- One can abuse / misuse contexts and perspectives as much as tags. Not a valid reason.
If you read my post, and especially the linked post by Ken Case from The Omni Group, you would know that tags, or something similar, will be coming. There’s no need for arguing about it. Regarding the compatibility, I believe The Omni Group when they say that backward compatibility will be broken when they add tags. You actually talk in your post about migrating databases, and to me, that sounds like something new versions of Omnifocus could do, not old.
Well. New version would have tags, not old version. So not an issue. If you have new version, problem solved. If you have old version, no tag, no problem. Or am I missing something?
Yes, you are missing something. Read the last part of the post I linked to.
The only problem that I can see with your solution is that it does not allow for easy managing those tags, you have to go into each individual task to make those changes where there might be occasions you want to retag a group of items
You can do a global find and replace.
Click on Projects so that the entire database shows up. The hit Command-F to bring up the Find box. Enter the Tag you want to change in the Find field, and then the new Tag that replaces it in the Replace field. One step, they all change.
Not as clean as if tag management were baked into the app, but it works well enough for me.
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Do you really get this example (from your old post) to work? When I try it, the search only finds tasks where Alan and David are written next to each other (which is what I would expect), not if there are other names between them. And for some reason it only works without slashes in front of the names.
Yes, it still works for me.
After reading your post I tried another experiment in which one item had the tags /alan and /betty (in that order).
Searching for “/alan /betty” was successful, and so was “betty /alan” even though the order was different from the item.
Not sure why it’s not wiring for you. Are you using OF Pro?
Ah - now I get it! I used the Search window (cmd-F), following your instruction, but as that explicitly states, it finds strings. When I used the search field in the toolbar instead, Omnifocus searches for the words separately, and my results become the same as yours. A great work-around till we get built-in tags! Thanks!
