Just updated to OmniFocus 4 on iOS and it just makes me so sad—there are just a ton of bugs and UI jankiness that OmniFocus 3 never had. It’s been almost a year, and I intentionally waited to upgrade in hopes that things would get ironed out, but it’s really hard to be optimistic if this is what it’s still like after this long (I assume SwiftUI should shoulder much of the blame, to be honest).
I know that I should file specific bugs, etc. I’ll try to do that. But the issues feel so obvious and prevalent that I have a hard time thinking it’s just a matter of putting it on their radar. Apologies for not being more constructive here but I just needed to vent.
It’s stable, I agree. My complaints are more stylistic:
Switching between tabs is noticeably slow on iOS. You can see the tab selected state change well in advance of when the actual content updates
Lots of animations are janky—try pulling to refresh on iOS and you’ll see the screen snap to the loading state rather than cleanly transition.
Tap the “new task” button when you’re at the top of a scrollable view. The transition down to the point in the list where the new task will be entered is not smooth
Switch between any other tab (e.g. Inbox or Projects) and the Forecast tab on iOS, and notice how the “Forecast” navigation title label has more left padding than the other screens’ navigation titles. Seems like a small thing but it’s noticeably jarring to effectively see a title move across the screen when it shouldn’t.
These are just a few, but I’ve found the app to be literred with small polish/quality issues like this. The result has been that the act of using OF 4 is distracting as these bugs make the software itself noticeable in a way that OF 3 never was for me.
That said, I still paid to upgrade and still use it all day every day. But I believe the OmniGroup holds themselves to a high standard and expects their customers to as well, I’d be remiss to not mention what feels like a dip in quality and polish compared to OF 3.
Thanks for listening, I’ll try to come back with some more examples.
I agree with first 3 points. Do not see any movement as per point 4.
Clearly, polish is missing, and that is disappointing for a product in development for years.
There is no argument for dismissing this on principle. But, there are two other arguments that help seeing this in perspective.
It does the job.
Do other apps (regardless of feature sets) work more fluidly? Yes. But, OmniFocus is on my devices because of its feature set and not because of how beautiful it looks or smoothly it operates. It is because of what it allows me to do and how.
Even Apple fails to do basic things right.
It is all about priorities. There are several annoyances in successive Mac OS X and macOS releases I have to contend with on a daily basis that I never had to with the humble yet venerable 10.2/ 10.3/ 10.4 and 10.6 releases.
Even with all the power of the M series chipsets, something like Launchpad animations do not feel as fluid as they could.
And that is a trillion-dollar company. It is all about priorities. Apple’s are revenue and bottomline, and in the ways to achieve those, user experience takes less of a priority than user interface, eye candy, and feature bombardment, regardless of whether all those work cohesively or not.
I am not sure what Omni’s priorities are with OmniFocus. What I do know is that a couple of months ago, the animations were much smoother on both iOS and macOS. They have taken a turn for the worse over the last couple of months.
If I had to chose one problem as the worst, it’s the positioning of the cursor and screen layout when opening/expanding/entering a task or project with a long note. Because it doesn’t actually position the cursor/pointer where it APPEARS to be positioned, it often incorrectly activates the set-repeat or set-tags dialog (for example). And it rarely ends up at the right spot.
So the only way to be precise is to click where you want (but know it’s not gonna end up there), then wait and let it settle, and THEN click where you want. It’s pretty annoying.
I agree with the original post, and have encountered numerous other bugs. The user interface has of course been modernised over the years, but Apple updates like Swift seem to generate a lot of work for Omni.
I just switched from Fluid to Column layout on macOS because of how buggy the row height animations are (often causing the scroll view to noticeably jump) in Fluid mode. It’s the default mode and a core operation. It’s clearly the expectation that we just accept glaring UI issues like this as the new status quo.
Column layout has its own problems. If you want the full title to be shown only when selected, you’re out of luck. It shows the full title with wrapping the whole time. It’s a known bug. Also, if you’re showing the due date in the forecast perspective, you’ll find the due date column takes up about three times as much space as it needs. Still I prefer column to fluid on the Mac, as it gets closer to the column layout that we saw in OmniFocus 1.