Omnifocus 3 is killing it!

#1

I’ve been using the Mac beta for a few weeks now and oh man, it’s really good! At first I thought tags, new perspectives and the new repetition settings aren’t that noteworthy but the more I use it, the more I have to agree that it’s really damn good.

Instead of having my life conformed to OF like it felt a little bit to me previously, I can now fit whatever I want into OF3 and let it handle it. Stuff like, I can tag a “Buy milk” task with multiple locations where I could buy milk makes things so much more dynamic and easier

I’m excited for the release 🙂

The obligatory wishlist section that I was hoping would come with OF3:

  • It really needs more keyboard shortcuts. I shouldn’t need keyboardmaestro to quickly jump to the tags/projects/defer/etc fields. OF is a power tool for me and having to use the mouse for most actions is a little annoying given the steep price. No problem with KM, but I want to buy the iPad version as well which probably has the same shortcut limitations. Things 3 is doing this incredibly well. There is nothing I can’t do with keyboard only in a matter of seconds
  • Manual sorting in perspectives. I get that perspectives are just a filter for the OF database, but storing list sorting data in the perspective shouldn’t be too difficult. Again, as a workaround I use KM and mess with sorting options to kind-of get custom sorting in it but that shouldn’t be necessary
  • Recipes/Templates for creating a new task in a perspective: OF currently has no idea what to do when I want to create a new task when in a perspective. Instead, let me tell it what attributes I want a new task to have in the perspective settings. If my perspective shows flagged tasks tagged with “Office”, let me specify somewhere that when I hit CMD-N in that perspective, that it should create a new tasks with flag and tag
  • (Maybe some way to make the forecast view more useful. Instead of picking a tag, let me choose a perspective that gets showed under “Today”)

Cheers!

#2

Hi dvcrn,
I’m interested to know how you integrate Keyboard Maestro with OF3 (been considering getting KM for a while now). Please can you share some examples?

Thanks!

#3

I use KM to ‘fix’ everything that I am not happy with. For OmniFocus in particular, I have KM shortcuts to quickly activate focus on a project, jump to the title field, add a tag to all selected todos and so on.

If you’re mac heavy I can definitely recommend it, but it’s more of a bandaid. It works okay and does the job, but official integration would be a lot better. (plus, you know, support for the same shortcuts on iPad)

My most used ones are these:

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#4

hey there, have been mucking around a bit with KM and thinking about buying it.

Any chance you could share screenshots of the makeup of some of those macros? Just so I can start to get an idea about how to build them myself.

thanks :)

#5

Most macros I have like “set priority” or “due tomorrow” use applescript. I have a script collection available here but the code isn’t very clean. But it can be a starting point.

I then tell KM to just execute the applescript on keyboard shortcut

For other things it can be as simple as executing a menu item and hitting TAB a few times until you’re in the field, or move the mouse from a corner to a certain button

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#6

Cool!

Have you played with B Terpstra’s hyper key? Utilizing Karibener-Elements. It is super handy when making KM macros.

#7

I don’t see a way to add tags through the menu. How did you get to the tags field?

Thanks for sharing!

#8

You can use KM to simulate going to the tags field by imitating what a user would do in OmniFocus.

Go to the menu bar and select View > Go to Inspector, it will result the cursor position. Press Tab once to enter the title field. Press tab two more times until you get to the tags field. Then type in some text to add a tag. Then probably simulate pressing the Return key to add a tag.

Create a macro that simulates these steps. of course, it might be easier just to use AppleScript to assign a tag on a selected task.