Thanks for all the feedback, everyone!
This sounds like the sort of thing I talked about in this paragraph of the roadmap:
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?
As noted in the roadmap, we’re implementing full keyboard support in our new iPad outline views:
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.
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.
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.)
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.
That’s the sort of work I was alluding to in this paragraph of the roadmap—particularly the last sentence:
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).
