It’s entirely possible that some or all of these questions have been addressed elsewhere. If that’s the case, please let me know and I will refer to them.
After some awkward starts and stops, I really got hooked into Omnifocus with OF2 for iPhone. Currently, I have the most recent releases of OF loaded on my iPhone, iPad and Mac and they are my go-to list and productivity apps.
**Learning Curve: *One thing I know I need to do is take a day or two to really learn/relearn OF2 from the ground up. Beyond the user manuals and the “intro videos” (all of which are useful) are there any fundamental how-to resources that folks know about? I’m looking for stuff that goes from basic -> advanced. Lynda.com has stuff that covers OF1, but not OF2 yet. These forums can be an excellent resource, but I have no idea where to start and reading through every post of every topic can be more confusing than helpful.
**Best Practices: **Also, although it might be staring right at me, I can’t seem to find the old topics, etc from the OF1 forums. This is relevant to me because others whose thought processes are similar to mine had figured out ways to use OF in ways that were incredibly helpful.
Changed Features: While mostly for the better, there are appear to be many changed features in OF2. In general, the product is much more intuitive to use and requires less time for the user to get comfortable with most of the features. I’m still having difficulty with creating perspectives. Through trial and error, I can eventually create the screen/filters to show me “just want I want.” But I have no idea how I got there and can’t find the breadcrumbs (lay usage of breadcrumbs) to figure out what I did. A post from about a month ago said that the feature to capture that set of filters “as is” into a new perspective is no longer part of OF2-Pro. Okay. Then this leads me to two (2) specific questions:
Is this a feature under consideration?
What’s the work around?
Setting the parameters without instantly understanding what those parameters do is not helpful to me, but being able to see the changes to a perspective in real-time would be fine. Having the ability to “see what I did” to create a specific screen would be fine.
Help!
ps. * = I realize the plural of forum is fora, but forums seems to be what’s used here, so that’s what I’m usin’. :-)
As for your specific questions, sorry, but I’m not sure what you are referring to. When you say “A post from about a month ago said that the feature to capture that set of filters “as is” into a new perspective is no longer part of OF2-Pro.”. Which post? What do you mean by “the feature to capture the filters to show you just what you want”? It seems to me, you need to spend some time going through the basics.
Hope this helps. In any case, if something is not clear, just shout. I’ll be happy to help, and many others as well.
Good luck ;-)
Thanks much for the links and suggestions. I didn’t know about the Inside Omnifocus website, but have now bookmarked it - definitely some very helpful info there.
I’m not sure why I didn’t scour YouTube for more information. A quick search of “Omnifocus” videos from the past year brings up loads of good info about OF2.
While Mr. Stringer’s site has some great info (the intro videos were good, but stuff I already knew), I’m unable to purchase a subscription at this time. Unfortunately, I’m a poor graduated student living entirely on loans. Depending on additional loans and/or side-work, I may be able to spring for the subscription in the (hopefully) near future.
Sorry for the “garble-in-translation” when I referenced an earlier forum topic. The idea is clear in my head, but must’ve gotten twisted up when put on the page. Here’s the link to the topic I referenced:
Happy that you fount it useful. I just realised the links were wrong. You can check now, I’ve fixed them :D
There are plenty of resources around the web and here on the forum, but I totally understand the amount of information can be overwhelming.
Inside Omnifocus is a great new website, as it is this collection of videos that have been circulating on twitter the last few days. They are the work of @cosmimuppet.
About not subscribing to Tim’s website, no worries, at least now you know about it :D
I was going to suggest Using Omnifocus as well, but the book by Kourosh Dini is not updated to OF2 yet. In any case, the site is well worth a look/bookmark as well.
Last, back to your specific question, tell me what exactly you have in mind if you like and I will be happy to help, if I can :D
I think my issue with perspectives is that I’m still learning how all of the filtering functions work, both on their own and with each other. In OF1, if I created a filtering recipe through normal use (ie. not specifically for a perspective and I wanted to “save” that filter recipe as a perspective, it was very easy to do. I simply had to say that I wanted to save the current (ie. what I was looking at) as my new perspective, then give this new perspective a name and I’d be off to the races.
Explained another way: One of the reasons I use OF is that I can have my life in it, but then drill down to what I want to work on and focus just on that. If I want to focus just on Widget purchases that I buy from the Acme Company for my Twiddle project, I could screw around with the filters until that’s what I saw on my screen. Then I could go, “Eureka! That’s how I want to look when I’m working on this!” In OF1, I had the ability to turn this specific filter recipe into a new perspective that I would then name “Acme for Twiddle” or something like that. The next time I wanted to work on this, I’d just go to this perspective. In OF2, I have to remember all of the specific filters I’ve applied when creating a new perspective as opposed to the just creating with a single “save this set of filters as a new perspective” type of button.
Hope that explains it. Unless this has been specifically fixed in OF2, this is one of the features that has been lost, unfortunately. :-(
On the bright side, I’m still happier with OF2 for Mac than OF1 for Mac in general.
Actually, never noticed it before — I guess I tend to rely on my already built perspectives all the time — but, I guess you’re right. You might want to submit a support (or feature) request to Omni via email, so to have their word?
