Thrilled with the new release so far, except in one respect.
The new inspector is very low information density. This causes two problems, neither of which was the case with OF2.
I guess reasonable people can disagree about this one, but IMO: it looks a mess because it’s visually on a completely different scale to the rest of the UX (bigger font, different typeface, different vertical spacing). An inspector should be the same or smaller than the main application.
This one is much more important: the density of information is extremely low. So low in fact, that you can’t see the entire inspector on a 13" laptop. As a regular user of the notes field, the inspector is now far less useful to me. This low density is due to the choice of a large font size, a lot of vertical whitespace, and a bunch more linebreaks rather than the tabular layout the inspector had in OF2.
Is this a design choice Omnigroup could take another look at?
If not, does anyone have any suggestions for how to fix this (other than buying a 15" laptop or closing and opening sections of the inspector)?
For notes at least there is always the option to click the notes icon when the note drops down. I keep the inspector closed unless I need it. For me the information probably should be bigger in the inspector (I am also on a MacBook Pro 13") I have the fonts for the tasks on the smallest option so can pack a fair bit on the screen, and TBH I tend to be able to skim tasks as I am familiar with them so the small font is no problem.
However for editing using the inspector where I am not so familiar with what is on there as I am not looking at it all the time the larger font makes it easier for my old tired eyes :)
Thanks, but my problem is that the bottom of the inspector isn’t visible during normal use of the application unless I’m using a non-13" display. I keep the inspector open because I use it a lot. Clicking the notes icon doesn’t solve my problem, which is that notes aren’t visible during normal operation.
And to be clear, I don’t want to get hung up on notes: my overall concern is that the Fisher Price UX of the new OF3 inspector prevents me from using it effectively on a 13" Macbook, and prevents me from shrinking the window below a certain size (pretty large!) size on a bigger display.
I also have the main view on the smallest font option, which makes the low density UX of the inspector (which completely ignores the OF’s font size setting?!) all the more frustrating.
I don’t think the inspector needs to be customizable. Not everything needs a setting I’d just like the defaults to work on a 13" Macbook. They don’t in OF3 but they did in OF2.
And to make things worse, Omnifocus doesn’t remember which bits of the inspector you’ve expanded/contracted between launches. So if you hide things so you can use notes in the inspector on a 13" laptop then quit, you have to do it all again. Obviously this is a bug.
(Although it would matter less if the inspector wasn’t so full of whitespace and line breaks and giant fonts.)
Heh, this wasn’t bothering me until you pointed it out. The whole inspector doesn’t even fit on my 15" MBP without scrolling, and altering the font size in Preferences has no effect. Ah well, I can obviously live with it since I didn’t even notice until now. ;)
