Omni Roadmap 2021> Wishes?

[KontiKonsumi]

I read the current Omni Road Map for 2021 and I am disappointed.

Omni Roadmap 2021

A few customers have reached out to me about this roadmap update asking if OmniFocus collaboration is still on the table—so I want to clarify that yes, OmniFocus collaboration is absolutely still on the table! We’ve been working very hard on collaboration throughout the year, along with technical compatibility and all of the other exciting feature improvements we discussed in the roadmap. As we explored the design implementation and started working, ourselves, as a distributed team during the p…

Why? Because a trash bin is still missing in OF and has not been yet implemented.

What is it that you are missing in this years Road map?

Konti

[Janov]

same as 2019 and 2020: better (no wrong word; is not there at all now) keyboard shortcut support on iPadOS. Been promised in the 2019 roadmap, 3rd year later: still nothing…

[TheOldDesigner]

Use software for what it is (and does) not for what you wish it was (or did).

Sure fire way to avoid disappointment and frustration.

I look forward to what the Omni Group come up with and may then wonder how I lived without [insert shiny new features], until then I am fine.

[KontiKonsumi]

What would you do without a Trash Bin on your MAc OSx Finder? ;-)

[MartinPacker]

I would hope that Automation isn’t “one and done”…

… In particular I’d like kicking off a script in (at least) Omnifocus to be a more filled out experience:

1. Start scripts from the context menu for an item.
2. Start scripts from buttons on a button bar.
3. Start scripts from keyboard shortcuts.

Right now it’s frustrating to start a script on selecting an item. (Unless I’m missing something.)

[kaitlin]

#3 is possible at the moment!

On iPadOS: https://www.omni-automation.com/omnifocus/actions-assign-key.html.
On Mac you can use the ‘Keyboard’ settings under System Preferences to assign keyboard shortcuts.

[MartinPacker]

Thank you! That is actually the least important of the three - because it really only applies when I have a keyboard attached.

The classic one for me is “bump this task by 2 weeks” or “bump this task by 4 weeks”. If I’m on my phone that’s much more fiddling than “bump by 1 week” or “bump by 1 month“.

[wilsonng]

@KontiKonsumi

What would you do without a Trash Bin on your MAc OSx Finder? ;-)

I would’ve created a Rubbish folder and move things into there. Then I have Hazel set to delete any file that has been added after 30 days.

As @TheOldDesigner suggested, if the app doesn’t do what you want, get inventive and find a way…

[KontiKonsumi]

I get the point that Omnifocus does not support this basic future. However for me it is not a feature, but rather a security measure for accidentially deleted tasks ands projects. Happens to me all the time on a dual screen especially. This is just sad. Period.

[JuliaTruchsess]

Support for pinch-zoom and resizable pictures in OmniOutliner. Also the ability to apply topic widgets (e.g. checkboxes) to only selected topics and not the whole outline. But who am I kidding, the chance of Omni putting any effort into OO is near zero.

[tkaufmann]

I was totally disappointed by the post which I don’t even consider to be a roadmap. A roadmap consists of features, version numbers and estimated release dates. What did we get instead? Self praise, look-backs and an improved outline view in the near future.

I miss a browser style forward/backward navigation in OF the most. The inspector is in dear need of a makeover, too, it’s way too small now that so many fields have been added over the years.

[Trager]

I just want nested projects and tasks in OmniFocus to be usable on iPad and iPhone, preferably without giving up a bunch of other functionality in the process. Every time Omni does a major UI refactor, it seems like they drop a bunch of features.

[MartinPacker]

You might be new around here. :-)

This was exactly what I expect and get every year. To get more precise at this stage is unreasonable and bound to be inaccurate. I want the broad sweep of where Omni Group is going, even though that is hostage to what Apple reveal at eg WWDC.

[jmpval]

I didn’t enjoy the roadmap either, which does not mean I know how to make it better.

I am computer literate but not IT professional. Actually an engineer, so I like some complexity. I use OF to get peace of mind and control in my personal life, through task management, mainly for the day to day ‘run your life’ type of protocols and iterative activities. Not so much for the ‘big projects’, which I find difficult to setup in OF in a meaningful workflow. I practice GTD as my main workflow.

In a nutshell, I feel like OF is targeting different customer profiles than mine for the future making it more difficult for the likes of me.

I’ve seen several comments from smart reviewers which first acknowledge the superiority of OF among other task managers and then recommend a simpler one

unless you want to invest so much time in the tool

.

So, looking at the roadmap I wonder which is the target customer for OF? An IT professional to automate workflows ? A team of professional who share projects and goals? An individual with just basic computer skills and a will to be productive? A Mac user or a multiplatform user?

All of the above

• is usually not a good strategy unless you are very very big. And looking at the roadmaps, it seems that just keeping up with the new apple releases already takes a big chunk of the programming capacity for the year. Tough problems, no doubt.

1. I guess OF is a mature product by now, and probably the more complex and feature-full task manager around. I love it because of that!. And for an individual productivity practitioner like me, it may already have more than needed at the peril of requiring too much time if it keeps getting more complex.

So being selfish, I would rather like OF invest in easier user interface to make easier worklows with the functionalities it already has than expanding in new automation and collaboration functionalities. For instance, a built in template functionality rather than scripts to interface with third apps. Same with subprojects. Nice and self contained (except for the calendar and documentation repositories)

2 Automation is not for all users. Requires expert knowledge, even just to install and debug ‘off the shelf’ scripts, keep with changes in the interfacing apps, apps I may or may not want to use. Except for Siri shortcuts, which comes ‘out of the box’ with myiphone, I don’t want to further complicate my setup. So maybe I would keep automation limited to Omni apps and out of the box Mac apps and forget about others.

3.- Also, collaboration in a team is to me a completely different animal, where you compete with other types of corporate tools and user requirements. ¿Is really OF really willing to compete in the collaboration tools space? A simple one step collaboration workflow will not make team users happy, I don´t think, since there area so many sophisticated collaboration suites available.

Just my own feelings and my best wishes for the great OF team. I appreciate the quality and compromise the software shows.

[numnumnum]

Nested projects (i.e. real “subprojects”, not just action groups)

[Trager]

Man, you hit the nail on the head. It occurred to me while reading your post that I don’t know who I would actually recommend OmniFocus to. Coworkers who ask for advice about a task manager present a really difficult decision matrix — the scientists who I work with generally need some degree of collaboration, programmers and engineers need much better hierarchical task structuring (and features like roll-ups and better dependency management would help), team leads need an entirely different set of tools which OmniFocus really doesn’t have at all.

Most importantly, my coworkers are busy with their actual jobs — pretty much every NASA project I’ve ever heard of is underfunded relative to the amount of work that needs to be done. Nobody has time to spend a bunch of effort learning a new tool AND customizing it for their particular workflows. OmniFocus has a lot of capabilities, but I do think it’s become much less open over the years in terms of how you use those capabilities, especially on mobile devices.

[kcase]

Thanks for all the feedback, everyone!

@KontiKonsumi

Why? Because a trash bin is still missing in OF and has not been yet implemented.

@KontiKonsumi

I get the point that Omnifocus does not support this basic future. However for me it is not a feature, but rather a security measure for accidentially deleted tasks ands projects. Happens to me all the time on a dual screen especially. This is just sad. Period.

This sounds like the sort of thing I talked about in this paragraph of the roadmap:

@kcase

While making sure our apps stay current, this past year we’ve also been focusing a lot of thought on how to make our apps’ user experience more elegant and smooth, and how to continually reduce friction.

You’ve mentioned a particular solution (a trash bin), but let’s take a step back to think about the actual problem you’re encountering. Why are accidental deletions of OmniFocus items so common that this is your biggest concern with the app? You’ve specifically mentioned this in the context of multiple screens, so presumably it’s that it’s easy to not realize where your keyboard is focused—and you can easily delete a task from the wrong window with a single keystroke. But surely it would be better to stop those accidental deletes before they happen, rather than relying on your noticing that something is missing and trying to find it in the trash to bring it back? (After all, if you notice right away you can already use Undo. And if you notice later, you can already find and grab them from a daily backup.) So, rather than adding a trash, perhaps a better solution would be to add an option to confirm deletes with some sort of prompt? Or perhaps to rebind the delete action to Command-Delete rather than a bare Delete keystroke, so it’s harder to accidentally invoke?

@Janov

same as 2019 and 2020: better (no wrong word; is not there at all now) keyboard shortcut support on iPadOS. Been promised in the 2019 roadmap, 3rd year later: still nothing…

As noted in the roadmap, we’re implementing full keyboard support in our new iPad outline views:

@kcase

Using SwiftUI, we’ve started creating new outline views for OmniPlan and OmniFocus—bringing even more of the power we’ve come to expect from our Mac apps to our iPad and iPhone apps. With these views, you will be able to edit your task outlines in place (rather than constantly shifting between viewing the outline and editing in an inspector), and you will be able to collapse and expand items at any level—all with full keyboard support, making edits as fluid on iPad keyboards as they are today on the Mac.

@MartinPacker

… In particular I’d like kicking off a script in (at least) Omnifocus to be a more filled out experience:

1. Start scripts from the context menu for an item.
2. Start scripts from buttons on a button bar.
3. Start scripts from keyboard shortcuts.

Right now it’s frustrating to start a script on selecting an item. (Unless I’m missing something.)

I should note that all three of those options are available in the app today, though they’re slightly platform-dependent. On iOS, the contextual menu for an item includes your custom scripts; on Mac, you can customize the toolbar to include your own scripts; and on both Mac and iOS, you can assign keyboard shortcuts to your scripts to invoke them with a single keystroke.

@JuliaTruchsess

Support for pinch-zoom and resizable pictures in OmniOutliner. Also the ability to apply topic widgets (e.g. checkboxes) to only selected topics and not the whole outline. But who am I kidding, the chance of Omni putting any effort into OO is near zero.

We love OmniOutliner, and would love to develop it at a faster pace—but we can’t afford to do everything we’d like to do each year. We’re an employee-owned company with no outside investors, so our work is funded from sales of our apps. We think everyone can benefit from an outliner, which is why we created the Essentials edition—but though it’s our least expensive app, it sells fewer copies than our most expensive app (OmniPlan).

So I’m sorry that we haven’t yet implemented the features that you’re looking for. But I hope you’ll recognize that we’ve put quite a lot of effort into OmniOutliner over the years, especially considering the resources we have available! It’s true that not every year will have as many improvements as when we shipped OmniOutliner 5—which introduced filters, document stats, distraction-free mode, side margins, cell highlight, research searching, touch bar support, dark mode, typewriter mode, a new file format, encryption, customizable keyboard shortcuts, side margins, multiple-row focus, and more. But since then we’ve also brought all those features to iOS, added searchable inline reference manuals, implemented Siri Shortcuts, added support for multiple windows on iPad, implemented first-class support for syncing over iCloud Drive, Scribble support for Apple Pencil, thumbnail previews, and cross-platform support for user scripts and plug-ins. Alongside all that work, we’ve also updated the Mac app to support High Sierra, Mojave, Catalina, Big Sur, and M1-powered Macs.

@tkaufmann

I miss a browser style forward/backward navigation in OF the most. The inspector is in dear need of a makeover, too, it’s way too small now that so many fields have been added over the years.

As I mentioned in the roadmap, the primary focus of all our teams right now is redesigning and rebuilding our apps based on the latest technologies and what we’ve learned over the years. As part of this work, we’re completely rebuilding our inspectors—not just the content area of the app. (Though rebuilding that area is also very important, as we see in this next comment.)

@Trager

I just want nested projects and tasks in OmniFocus to be usable on iPad and iPhone, preferably without giving up a bunch of other functionality in the process.

I think you’ll find nested projects and tasks to be much more usable with the new outline I mentioned in the roadmap, with its support for inline editing and collapsing/expanding groups at any level of nesting.

@jmpval

In a nutshell, I feel like OF is targeting different customer profiles than mine for the future making it more difficult for the likes of me.

…

So being selfish, I would rather like OF invest in easier user interface to make easier worklows with the functionalities it already has than expanding in new automation and collaboration functionalities. For instance, a built in template functionality rather than scripts to interface with third apps. Same with subprojects. Nice and self contained (except for the calendar and documentation repositories)

That’s the sort of work I was alluding to in this paragraph of the roadmap—particularly the last sentence:

@kcase

Since writing that back in July, we’ve taken a step back to think about how we would design and build our apps if we were starting again now, building on the latest technologies and taking into account everything we’ve learned from our customers about how you use our apps. One of the biggest lessons we’ve learned is that each person uses our apps differently. Some want to go deep in just one specific area, but want to use the rest at a lighter level. It’s important to keep our products easy to approach for those who don’t need to go deep.

@Trager

Man, you hit the nail on the head. It occurred to me while reading your post that I don’t know who I would actually recommend OmniFocus to. Coworkers who ask for advice about a task manager present a really difficult decision matrix — the scientists who I work with generally need some degree of collaboration, programmers and engineers need much better hierarchical task structuring (and features like roll-ups and better dependency management would help), team leads need an entirely different set of tools which OmniFocus really doesn’t have at all.

You’re absolutely right, team leads need an entirely different set of tools than what OmniFocus provides. Have you looked at OmniPlan? It supports roll-ups, task dependencies, resource scheduling, and beyond its outline presentation it also has full support for viewing and editing a project in a timeline Gantt chart view or as a network diagram (based on dependency relationships). It can integrate with external calendars (both reading and publishing), and supports full collaboration with other OmniPlan users. It supports scripting and automation to let it integrate with other systems, and is a mature product (developed years before OmniFocus) which is trusted by many businesses (including multiple Fortune 5 companies) as well as government and educational institutions.

The OmniFocus view of a project is from an individual collaborator’s point of view, where our customers typically don’t need anywhere near that level of control or complexity at the project level. Where its power comes into play is with managing concerns across many projects, with tools for capturing and categorizing that work so that a collaborator can focus on the work which is available to them at a particular moment rather than being distracted with long lists of items that aren’t yet available for them to do.

OmniFocus and OmniPlan have complementary strengths, and customers have long been asking for richer integration between the two apps. Some of that is possible now, using Omni Automation, but it’s not nearly as easy to set up and use as we’d like it to be. Building that integration is part of our vision for collaboration in OmniFocus—though obviously we also want customers to be able to collaborate directly between OmniFocus instances for projects which are simple enough to not require OmniPlan. But for projects which do need that depth, we have a tool which serves that need (and already supports collaboration).

[Janov]

@kcase

As noted in the roadmap, we’re implementing full keyboard support in our new iPad outline views:

That would be great @kcase, thanks for highlighting !

[Trager]

I do already have a license for OmniPlan, but the considerable price of the product means that it’s not easy to recommend unless someone actually needs to do project planning. It just so happens that I fall into the narrow band of JPLers who does need to do project planning but doesn’t have a dedicated project scheduler (which is generally a specialized role) to utilize. OmniPlan is not good as a task management system, and most technical staff need task management, not project planning. Also, while OP has integration with external calendars, that support does not appear to extend to Microsoft Exchange, which is still the default for all NASA facilities.

I don’t understand the claim that OF’s “power comes into play with managing concerns across many projects”. That isn’t true for me at all, since the device that I primarily use for task management during the day is an iPad, and there is no solution for hierarchically structured efforts that works at all on the iPad. The best that I could come up with would be to either use tags or folder structures and create an associated perspective for the level of focus I need with each. That’s pretty unwieldy, and considering I generate new projects on a near-daily basis, it’s not worth the time investment. As a result of that, OF totally fails at allowing me to focus on the work that’s available at a given moment.

Many of the people I work with likewise have a wide variety of concurrent projects with shifting priorities (spaceflight aint easy!). It is unfortunately common for an emergency to come up that preempts all of the planned tasks and makes everything need to move out by days. OF gets pretty hard to manage when you have a couple dozen projects that need to be reviewed on a near-daily basis. Why aren’t there perspective options for filtering by time (both relative and absolute)? I imagine that if I spent enough time writing javascript I could come up with a way to do that, but I’m generally too busy writing mission-critical stuff to be able to devote time to fun automation work. In theory, that’s why I pay so much money to Omni.