OmniFocus 2 across different platforms - any new options with Windows 10?

AngryMiniVanDriver · November 7, 2015, 5:36pm

In short, I am curious if any new methods to running OmniFocus on a physical Windows machine have come about in the past few years. Here is more detailed information:

So I had the original OmniFocus 1 and thought it was pretty good…but OmniFocus 2 blows me away. I use it on two Macs and one iPhone (currently a 6s in iOS9.1.) I am also using Graffle Pro (the second-to-most recent gen), GraphSketcher, and Outliner Pro. If it matters, my computers are both 15 inch MacBook Pros, one a 2015 retina model and one the 2011-2012 model right before the retina version came out, both with quad core i7s, 16GB RAM, discrete GPUs, and SSD’s running 10.11.1 El Capitan. I have VMWare Fusion 8 on both of them, and have Windows 4.0, 98SE, XP x32 Pro, 7 SP1 x64 Pro, and 10 x64 Pro installed on each, along with various Linux and OS X revisions. To date, I have used Fusion to cross over Omni software to use inside of the Windows VMs. But with what I want to do I do not think this is an option.

I went to Mac because I was very unhappy with the quality of an older Windows operating system, and the quality of the available PC machines. I still love Macs, but things have really changed with Windows. While tons of Windows users tend to look at change as being unquestionably bad regardless of anything else, I think Windows 10 Pro is pretty awesome and it makes huge improvements over the traditional disappointment that Windows has been. I’ve also been blown away by the Surface Pro 4 because it is one of the few tablets that can deliver the performance I would want. I am probably going to buy a full spec’d model with an i7, 16GB RAM, and SSD. If Apple had a tablet hybrid like this that ran OS X, I would buy their version of it in a heartbeat, but they don’t have anything even close to a tablet with desktop processing power, which I need for number crunching.

For the most part, I will purchase the Windows versions of programs I use on Mac, except OmniFocus 2 and OmniOutliner don’t have Windows versions. What do you suggest I do? So far, either remoting in to one of my Macs, or attempting to run a OS X VM that can cross over into Win10 seems to be the most practical options? Are there any cross-compatible programs that could sync with OmniSync to update the same DB? Any experience or thoughts here?

Thank you!

BarryW · November 23, 2016, 6:46pm

I agree with everything Mr. Angry said :).

I’m a software developer. I’ve been using OS X for many years. Recent events leave me pretty confident that my needs will not be met much longer by Apple on the Mac. So I have to find a new home within the next year or two. I’ve never been a fan of Windows, but Windows 10 Pro is really great. I’ll also consider a pure Linux solution. My biggest hurdles are replacing OmniGraffle (if I go to Linux), OmniOutliner, and OmniFocus (to a lesser extent).

I’m only posting this to add a bit of volume to the OP.

Perhaps a topic for a different thread - discuss any plans to port the programs to the other platforms. But this would hijack the thread since the OP has immediate needs that a future port would not address.