I use Omnifocus for the web in the office on my Windows workstation. When I open certain perspectives, the single action lists and projects are collapsed and I then have to click on each list and each project to make the tasks visible. What could be the cause of this behavior and how can I change it? Do I have to change the perspective with Omnifocus for Mac?
Another attempt at finding a clue:
In Omnifocus I manage my tasks with around 90 single action lists/projects in various folders. I have 20+ perspectives (Today, Burn, Do it, Start, Due, Calendar, On Hold, Plan, Agendas, Errands…). Everything works fine with Omnifocus for Mac and iPhone/iPad and I am very satisfied.
But when I open my own “Today” perspective (tasks with the tag “today”, due date, etc.) in Omnifocus Web on my Windows workstation in the office, the single action lists are usually all collapsed. Double-clicking on folders shows all lists and projects, but the tasks cannot be seen. For example, I double-click the Office folder, only the lists/projects are visible, but not the tasks. If I then click on an individual project, all tasks suddenly appear in the relevant folder. The displayed home folder at the same level as the office folder can’t be made to expand the lists no matter what I do. I have to click on each project/list individually to see my tasks for the day. It’s starting to get on my nerves. Start Omnifocus Web in the morning and then I have to do index finger exercises for several minutes before I can get started.
I am currently considering switching to ToDoist or another app. I have no problems with the limited functionality of the web version compared to the IOS/OSX versions, but the click exercises when using perspectiven are slowly becoming a no-go for me.
What am I doing wrong or what is causing Omnifocus Web to behave this way?
Please reach out to our tech support humans by reporting this issue to omnifocus-web@omnigroup.com. You’ll receive a response from our team within one day, and we can work with you to determine what’s going on given the detailed specifics of your situation.
OmniFocus for the Web is meant to remember which item groups you’ve expanded and which haven’t been expanded in a perspective, so it restore the same expansion state the next time you return. There are also situations where the web app will auto-expand items, but it has to be careful about doing this because it affects the initial loading time for a perspective and you’d have to wait for everything to load before being able to hide items. (In those situations it’s much better to hide by default so things load quickly, giving you control over what you want to see next.)
For that reason, there’s a performance tuning limit where the web app only automatically expands groups which contain 50 items or less. We made that 50-item limit configurable (via the localStorage.autoexpandLimit setting), and our support humans can help you experiment with different settings to find what works best for you.
When we initially put this parameter in place, it would take about a minute to display a perspective with 500 items—so it was very important to not overwhelm the browser with too much data and 50 items seemed like a more usable experience. But we’ve done significant performance work since then, bringing that minute-long load time to under six seconds. And somewhere along the way we added incremental loading, so you didn’t have to wait for the entire page contents to load before seeing some results.
So if you have a good network connection to our servers, it might be reasonable to raise that limit to 1,000 items or even higher. Just bear in mind that it will affect the initial load times of large perspectives.
(Reminder: these forums are a place for conversations with other Omni customers, they’re not a forum for tech support! I’m sorry this thread went unseen and unanswered for a full year: a quick email message or phone call to our support team would have received a response within one business day, but these forums are not monitored by our support team.)
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Thank you very much for the answer.
I didn’t contact support because at first I assumed there was something I didn’t know about how to use Omnifocus Web. When there were no replies to my posting, this reinforced this impression.
Very informative, Ken, thank you.
