I spend 50+ hours a week at my employer-mandated Windows laptop. Yes, I can pull my attention away from my 2 24" monitors and squint at my iPhone screen to view / manage my tasks, but it would be great to instead open a browser tab with Omnifocus Web app and manage my tasks.
So much so that I’ve already moved my Mail, Calendar, and Contacts out of iCloud into Google G Suite for easier access and better features than iCloud.com .
I added a task to research and alternative to Omnifocus such as Asana, Todoist, etc. With people like myself being forced to spend copious time away from their beloved Apple devices, cross-platform availability is a must.
I really hope that OF 3 is Web-erized so that I can leverage my huge investment of time in it’s ecosystem.
As I recall, the frustrating, post-it then withdraw-it transition events that occurred going from OF1 to OF2 revolved somewhat around the seeming inability of OmniGroup to decide whether they should incorporate new features or update the UI. In the end, (again as I recall) OF2 was developed somewhat from the ground up to comply with the new macOS code base and to incorporate new UI features across all devices. Features that had been standard in OF1 were dropped in the first releases of OF2, and some of them still have yet to be seen in OF2 (e.g. the ability of a perspective window on macOS to remember its location and view settings).
Rather than promoting for an overall “visual upgrade” and a host of new features, I hope to see OG present a more efficient UI design and improve currently ineffective “features” (e.g. the archive option is useless IMO and the inability to have perspective windows remember settings is a sad state after all this time). The only new features that I truly want are the abilities to drop tasks and to use multiple tags/contexts, with consistency across iOS and macOS platforms.
I agree with you about the inability of perspectives to save window state (I used this all the time with OF1) and the archive. I must have 10 years of archived tasks, but for what end? I can’t see, search, or act on any of that. I only archive to reduce my database size.
The sidebar in OF2 still doesn’t work right; it changes size when different elements are selected.
Hopefully you’ve all seen this by now, but we’ve announced our roadmap for 2018 including OmniFocus 3 for Mac and iOS as well as OmniFocus for the Web.
Hi Ken, thanks for sharing the roadmap and letting us know what’s in store.
As a long time OF user, I have to say: I’m incredibly excited about the announcements! For me, it even exceeds what I was hoping for. New tags, new reminders, a new design, web access, automation. There’s even a way to implement collaboration: that’s fantastic! I can’t wait to testdrive the OF3 dev builds.
To me it really shows how dedicated Omni is to an app I use and love every single day. Thanks for your hard work, and looking forward to the future of OF!
I love the fonts being used in OF2’s UI -> I hope you’re keeping them for OF3 - they do very well with my ageing eys (maybe here and there some heavier (customisable?) weights, but that’s nitpicking)
If you’re replacing contexts with tags, I hope that perspectives will support boolean logic when determining what shows up in that perspective. It would be useful to be able to have all tasks that are tagged with #home but only if they are also tagged with #15minutes or something like that. Right now the default behavior of treating Context and Project lists in perspectives as inclusive OR sets is good enough, but if the tag is going to be doing all of the heavy lifting more complex perspectives will be needed to make the best use of it.
Without this, I really see little meaningful difference between OmniFocus 3 and Things 3 (except that Things already supports the better date features for repeating tasks, and Omnifocus supports nested projects, which is sometimes handy and sometimes just enough rope to hang yourself with). Perspectives really are OF’s killer feature, and without the more sophisticated boolean logic, I keep bouncing back and forth between OF and Things. Turning perspectives into “smart” filters would basically cement OF’s place in my workflow.
I was intrigued by this ‘contexts vs tags’ post, but did not fully understand the ‘significance’ of the phrase “Right now the default behavior of treating Context and Project lists in perspectives as inclusive OR sets is good enough, but if the tag is going to be doing all of the heavy lifting more complex perspectives will be needed to make the best use of it.”. I would appreciate any further explanation of this comment
I’d also like a perspective bar/dashboard “switcher”. I think many people have a top level segregation of perspectives. Most typical would likely be Home/Work. Would be nice to be able to design a perspectives bar (Mac) or dashboard (iOS) specific to each and then just activate whichever one is relevant at the time.
The OF3 mentions in the Jan blog post exceeds my expectations actually. Some notion of task sharing AND tags. Very cool. Still curious what improvements will be there for perspectives to leverage tags. Ability to say “show all with tag A and tag C but not tag F”. So you can do stuff with a “Today” view that is flagged, or due soon and in your “errands” tag or “weekend” tag.
Right now when you create a list of contexts to display in a perspective, that list is treated as an inclusive OR statement for each context. So you’re basically saying “Include every task that is in any of these contexts.” (#context1 OR #context2 OR #context3)
If contexts are replaced with tags, and tags can be used for anything, including but not limited to context, this basic functionality will start to feel more limiting. It would be useful to say things like “Include every task that is in one of the following contexts AND is also tagged with #easy10minutes”.
Essentially: (#context1 OR #context2 OR #context3) AND #easy10minutes
The default behavior of perspectives right now cannot support more complex logic that combines AND and OR statements, but if tags are doing more work now than the old contexts did, we’re going to want to be able to create more sophisticated queries to get the most out of them.
Basically, if OF is going to replace context with tags, there will be that much less differentiating it from Things. OF has perspectives, but they’ve always felt kind of half-implemented. The GTDness of the app and the inherent constraints of the GTD framework helped justify this lack of full functionality, but dropping that pretense makes it harder to justify that design choice. The first of these two apps (the only two apps that really get start dates right) to offer real smart filters wins my vote.
I read the recent blog post. OmniJS coming to OmniFocus 3 is a great announcement! Looking forward to test it! AppleScript and Javascript for Automation improvements would be welcomed, too.
A great feature that Omnifocus 2 lacks (and many GTD apps for that matter) is some stats about the tasks. For example, a stats section next to Attachements/Notes/Info that shows you when the task was created, when was it last edited, and when was it completed (exact date and time)
In the context of the 2018 roadmap, is there plans to have a redesign of the Mac as well? Will the Mac be seeing all of these features? A lot of the blog post seemed to be in the context of iOS, and want to make sure that all of these are going to be seen on the Mac as well (cc @kcase)
Also, some things I’m keeping an eye on for OmniFocus 3:
Share Extension updates (iOS). This needs to be updated to provide more glanceable information, pull in article names (if applicable) to the name of the task if sharing a URL, allow you to set everything there without going into the app, or at the very least flag things.
Better support for viewing/manipulating attachments, on iOS especially. Currently if I have two photos on a task and tap one to view, I have to dismiss the view to view the other one. Can be better. In the same vein, a better viewer for attachments on the Mac. Currently they expand inline with a note, and it’s just less than ideal. Maybe also consider to have an attachment type of “link”, letting you specify a webpage?
Markdown in notes. Maybe?
Support for adding locations to tags on the Mac.
I’ll come up with more stuff as they come to mind. I’m also keeping a keen eye on the design; the screenshot given seemed to have a bunch of whitespace, although I like the direction and can understand the intent.
They did announce somewhere in the forums that they are releasing the iOS version in TestFlight first and then roll out the Mac TestlFlight shortly thereafter.
