OF4 obviously slower on my iPad than OF3

OmniFocus
#1

Browsing in OF4 on my iPad is a pita. I just opened OF3, and it was a breeze…
It’s a 11” 2018. (Apple iPad Pro 11 (2018) - Full tablet specifications)

Is it only me?

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#2

I have the exact same iPad, no problems here.

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#3

Thanks for the input!
At the moment when I was having problems, I was connected to my cellular and had a really slow internet. Could that have made OF slow? OTOH, OF3 was still quick and snappy.

However, I have killed all open apps and done a restart of the iPad. It feels quicker. Time will tell…

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#4

I also experienced slowness (is that a word?) on my M1 iPad pro. It happened when dragging tasks onto another task to make them subtasks. It took about two seconds for the screen to update to the new state. Not terrible, but surprising.

#5

There are a lot of factors at play here! One is that OmniFocus 4 is simply doing more work than OmniFocus 3 ever did: with OmniFocus 4, you can choose which fields are displayed in the outline and in what order, and whether additional fields should display when an item is selected. In v3, the title could wrap across multiple lines but the rest of the fields had a fixed layout that always had to fit within a single line (which meant the layout engine could assume that those fields always took the same amount of space), but in v4 those fields will wrap across multiple lines as needed (giving the layout engine more work to do). And, of course, v4 now has support for displaying and editing rich text notes in the outline, including attachments (which can be arbitrarily expensive to display).

And, of course, OmniFocus 4 (and the underlying SwiftUI) haven’t had nearly as many years of performance tuning as v3 (and the underlying UIKit) have had. SwiftUI itself has dramatically improved its performance for displaying this sort of outline since we started building v4—we wouldn’t have been able to ship these capabilities with usable performance if we were still building on the SwiftUI that shipped with iOS 15. And Apple has continued to make improvements each year—though their latest improvements require iOS 17, while OmniFocus 4.0 only requires iOS 16 (so we can’t rely on those improvements yet).

We think the app is usable now (after a lot of hard work on performance), while being more efficient to use and far more capable. But we’d love for it to be snappier. We’ll continue to work on performance over the coming months and years, just as we did with earlier versions of the app. It should only get better from here!

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#6

Thanks for the update to this thread Ken - good to know what’s causing the slightly slower activity. I have a similar aged iPad Pro (2019) and an iPhone 14 Pro…am looking forward to both of them speeding up as the underlying technology evolves. From a very happy Omnifocus User since v2!

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#7

Glad to read this! v4 is the second major version of OF I’ve used, and yes, v3 was snappier. Helpful to understand why this is/was the case.

Congratulations on the stable release for v4.

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#8

I’ve also noticed lag on my iPad Air 5, which has an M1 chip and 8GB of memory. In particular:

  • Pressing p and then trying to filter projects has text lag filtering the projects. At times keyboard strokes are buffered, and then catch up.
  • There’s significant lag changing perspectives, such as going between Forecast and Projects. You can see the sidebar colour marker update, and then the perspective draws roughly 1.5 seconds later.

Some other points:

  • I don’t feel any lag on my Macbook (M2 Max / 64 GB)
  • I also don’t feel any lag on my iPhone 12 mini - but perhaps that’s because there’s more animations that mask it?
  • I generally use my iPad with an external keyboard. Perhaps the increased typing speed makes some of the editing lag more apparent.
  • I’m using stage manager on the iPad, but OmniFocus is the only active app currently.
  • Honestly, the Watch OS app feels faster than the iPad OS app!

I’m curious if anyone is using OF 4 on a base model M1 MacBook Air. If there’s no lag there, perhaps this really is some iPadOS specific bug.

Likewise, does anyone have any workarounds that improve performance for iPad OS?

#9

I mostly use OF on my iPad, but I have a similar experience. My M1 iPad is painfully slow using OF4 switching perspectives. As there is no longer an add to inbox option, I have to switch to the inbox before I add a new item. With the very slow perspective changing, this makes this workflow so painful, I’ve resorted to using my phone for inbox and my iPad for review.

Organizing is much harder in the new OF on iPad and iOS than before, so I now use my Mac to reorganize. So, now I have to basically use 3 devices for different workloads in OF 4. It’s frustrating as I’ve used OF for well over a decade, so I’m hopeful as Ken suggested that the rough edges will improve over time.

#10

I’ll make a suggestion, assuming I’ve understood correctly.

When adding a new item, you may skip having to first switch to the Inbox Perspective.

Double tap the Plus button in the bottom right, and whatever you add will go to Inbox, irrespective of your current view. Otherwise, single tap lets you add to the current view.

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#11

Thank you! That’s very helpful and streamlines that workflow. I know the docs are still being updated for OF4, but some of these shortcuts aren’t easy to discover.

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