OmniFocus 4 First Look & Invitation to Help Test

[saltedlolly]

@Hal9K

It still does baffle me that Tags don’t work the way I assumed they would when OF3 came out. I’d like to, for example, have two dimensions of Tags for tasks. Let’s say location and energy level, although they’re just for illustration.

If I create a perspective and want to see my available tasks grouped by location Tags, I can only see either a mess of Tag combos like “Home, High Energy,” “Home, Low Energy,” “Office, High Energy,” and “Office, Medium Energy” or have the energy level tags chilling out in the perspective to clutter it up and be ignored. If I were to collapse those Tags, though, OF would collapse them everywhere.

If I create a perspective to include certain Tags I should be able to only group by those included Tags and not others.

For lack of this ability, I still do things essentially the OF2 way and rarely assign multiple tags to a task.

Yes. THIS. It drives me crazy… When trying to view all tasks tagged with a particular tag, the UI gets cluttered with all these these other tags that I don’t need to see. It is not so bad on desktop, but on the iPhone or iPad it is infuriating. It seems so fundamental that you should be able to create a perspective to display tasks with a particular tag, listed in tag order. I’m always surprised that this hasn’t been fixed yet because anyone who uses a lot of tags is likely to encounter the issue. I’ve been waiting for a fix since OF3 was released. PLEASE fix this in OF4.

[saltedlolly]

@timstringer

I desperately hope that OmniFocus 4 will add the ability to have tasks repeat at specific times of day - e.g. every day at 6pm - so that regardless of whether they are ticked off the night before or in the morning they still reoccur at the time specified.

This is possible in OmniFocus 3…though it may not be exactly what you’re looking for.

For example, you can have a repeating action that’s deferred to 6pm and set to repeat daily with “Repeat From This Item’s” set to “Assigned Dates”.

When you mark this complete, it will be deferred to the next date in the cycle. If the action was deferred to yesterday at 6pm, and is marked complete this morning, it will become available again today at 6pm. The caveat is that if the action were deferred to two days ago at 6pm and you marked it complete today, the new defer date would be yesterday at 6pm. In this case, you’d probably want to manually adjust the defer date.

My other request is for Perspectives to finally support tags properly - i.e. let us create a Perspective to display tasks that include a specific tag (and this is the important bit) without also displaying all the other tags that those tasks are tagged with . Currently, the other tags clutter the interface, making using it on a daily basis a complete headache.

In OmniFocus 3 (and OmniFocus 4) you can change the View settings so that tags are not displayed.

I hope this helps!

Thanks Tim, unfortunately I have tried these and every single workaround I can think of but none of them are ideal. A way to create tasks that repeat based on a specific time seems like the best solution. Your suggestion about hiding tags does not solve the issue. If you look at the attached images, I you can see the Perspective settings and what it ends up displaying. It should only display tagged “Ritual (Afternoon)” but it ends up including all these other tags that you are unable to exclude.

[timstringer]

Thanks for sharing your comments @saltedlolly.

@saltedlolly

Your suggestion about hiding tags does not solve the issue. If you look at the attached images, I you can see the Perspective settings and what it ends up displaying. It should only display tagged “Ritual (Afternoon)” but it ends up including all these other tags that you are unable to exclude.

Turning off “Show tags” will only hide the tags for the actual tasks. Is it essential to group actions by tags? If you haven’t already, perhaps try another grouping (or just leave this perspective ungrouped).

[saltedlolly]

@timstringer

Turning off “Show tags” will only hide the tags for the actual tasks. Is it essential to group actions by tags? If you haven’t already, perhaps try another grouping (or just leave this perspective ungrouped).

The problem is is that if you don’t group by tag, it is not possible to manually reorder the tasks. (at least I have not found a way to do it.) They seem to be appear in some arbitrary order.

[timstringer]

@saltedlolly — If you set “Group actions by” to “Ungrouped”, you can using the “Sort actions by” setting to control the sort order of the ungrouped list. Though without the tag group(s), it isn’t possible to manually order actions within the custom perspective.

[kriisig]

I use this workaround from Rosemary

https://rosemaryorchard.com/blog/using-keyboard-maestro-to-create-an-always-up-to-date-task-calendar-from-my-omnifocus/

So the due dates can be wrong on my Iphone and Ipad for a little while but when I run my calendar app on my mac (usually everyday) it gets back on track.

[pruitthall]

I’m testing 4 on the iPhone and have to chime in, I’m really, really not crazy with the new Forecast look. The old iOS Forecast gave a gorgeous top summary with a mini calendar bar and this has been changed to a filter now. It definitely isn’t as succinct as the old version. And, the new version counts your ‘total’ summary of the day; i.e. if your settings are to show the tagged calls for a day, that’s now in the count, PLUS your tasks. That’s a big change. Or a bug :)

Since I live essentially in the Forecast module, changes there jump out to me more readily.