OmniFocusColors app: How to tell what's what?

Can anyone tell me what (Placeholder), (Normal), (Hovered), (Pressed) and (Strong) mean. The names seem logical enough and having worked with HTML a bit seems like mouse or selected states but they don’t seem to change anything for me regardless if an action is selected, mouse is over it or if is hovered. I have changed them to different colors and nothing changes.

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Hi! The metadata text applies to the labels that describe the action items. More of them show when you are viewing columns than when you are viewing using “fluid”.

Example:

Office in the selected row shows the Content: metadata text (Placeholder) combined with the Content: metadata text (Hovered) because my cursor was over it.

Yesterday shows the Content: metadata text (Overdue: Normal) state as 11:00PM shows the Content: metadata text (Due Soon: Normal). To see Content: metadata text (Due Soon: Placeholder), go to where you’ve set the date and delete what is in there. While you are editing, the placeholder color shows.

In the default Color Palettes, we don’t use different colors for every setting. This is partly because it is a bit jarring if the colors are too different as you edit, but we did want to provide the ability to set them for those who wish to customize. Those using your custom style will see them or not depending on the preferences they use for the view settings in Layout Preferences.

Strong shows up when you check “Show folders in the Outline” and it controls the text based on the status of the project or for the normal “Strong text color” that is what is used for folders. Also, when you are editing the text itself, the “Strong” color for the status applied is used. Try this with projects, action groups, and action items to see how it impacts the color. That question was so tricky I had to experiment and ask around, so thank you for a great question.

I hope this helps!

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This is great, I will need to find an hour or so to experiment around, the picture certainly helped thanks a bunch! I wonder if OmniGroup might provide a 5 or 10 page PDF with circled numbers corresponding to all the options. It would be so nice to just look at the place where you want to change and see a number with a circle and find the corresponding value(s).

I certainly love the new options and surprisingly have found things for the most part to now be even easier to find/differentiate in OmniFocus 2. Thanks for the wonderful update and work!

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These are my settings:

“Content: metadata text (Placeholder)”
Changes Defer, due, est. time and completed column and empty content location. This is great that all these options are there but it feel like pure guess work. So glad that the app is made no doubt, I just hope Omnigroup doesn’t stop there.

“Perspective Tint: Projects” is what changes the folder colors for me.

Content: metadata text (Strong) I noticed changed the text of the folders changed with this. Thanks for telling me about “Show folders in the outline” I didn’t have that checked.

That’s one out of six that I can see a difference on, I’ll keep playing but I feel like I am just wasting time now.

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I agree with you that the other (Strong) items do not appear to be used in the way I’d expect. The issue has been reported. Sorry for the trouble with Strong. If I learn something new, I’ll share here.

While we released an annotated version of the style file for our Font Collection, there currently isn’t a companion item for Color Palettes. It has been requested. I know that the keys are named logically for how OmniFocus uses them, but for those of us who are trying to puzzle it out visually, it can take some time to translate through trial and error, so I agree with you that it would be a nice reference. Thank you for explaining in so much detail what you are trying to do!

Here’s a link to a PDF with our test team’s notes on each of the color settings. Many of the entries have before and after screenshots so you can see what they affect:

http://people.omnigroup.com/kc/omnifocus/OmniFocus%20style%20settings%20-%20colors.pdf.zip

Hope this helps!

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Now we’re talking! Thanks!

@kcase @lanettetest I’m still wondering how to customize action groups color and, especially, font (eg weight). Looks like the PDF doesn’t cover that.

Action groups use the same color settings as other tasks: OFIContentAvailableTaskTitleColor, OFIContentOverdueTaskTitleColor, etc.

An action group’s font can be customized using the OFITextStyleActionGroupTitle setting. By default it inherits its content-sizes and height-paddings from the plain action style (OFITextStyleActionTitle), but uses the bold font rather than the regular font.

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An action group’s font can be customized using the OFITextStyleActionGroupTitle setting. By default it inherits its content-sizes and height-paddings from the plain action style (OFITextStyleActionTitle), but uses the bold font rather than the regular font.

Great, thanks! If only support could help with that in the first place (see ticket #155893, the updated section in my original report).

Wonderful. This will help tremendously! Looks like I will be playing with this tonight!

Thanks Ken that is very helpful, I was in the process of making a document with pictures.

http://reference.StudioPrime.com/forums/OmniFocus/OF2/CLARIFIED_-OmniFocus_style_settings-_colors-2.pdf.zip

I tried to change OFIContentBlockedTaskTitleColor to blue while making sure OFIContentAvailableTaskTitleColor is black. But I’ve got all action grops in blue as well, not only blocked actions.

Is there any way to make blocked (i.e. On Hold and Deferred for a future date) a different color from “available” action groups–eg from those which are not deferred nor on hold, but contain available sub-actions?

There are several ways something can be blocked: by its defer date, by its project state (e.g. On Hold), by its context state (e.g. On Hold), and by any task dependencies. Completing an action group is considered dependent on completing its children, so until those children are complete it will be considered blocked.

So, let’s say you have a task list like this:

- Action Group 1 @parallel(false)
	- Action 1a
	- Action 1b

This is the order in which the above tasks would become available (one at a time in this case, since the group isn’t marked parallel):

  • Action 1a
  • Action 1b
  • Action Group 1

This “available” state affects both status colors and inclusion in any perspective which are configured to only show available items.

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Thanks for detailed explanation, Ken. Do I read correctly that there’s therefore no possible way to make action group having available sub-actions the same color A as the available sub-actions, while having deferred and on-hold actions to have a different color B?

Yes, that’s correct. Sorry to disappoint!

I’m even more fo a beginner, I can open the styles file but can’t see how to actually get a color selected and moved into one of the little boxes int eh file to change it. Opening the colors lets me get the colors into the frequently used but no way to drag or copy them from there into the styles document.

Click on the rectangle to the right to bring up the options for selecting colors. Hope this helps!

Sort of, I didn’t ask the right question. Yes, I can see the colors and I can get the rectangle on the right to switch to the color I want on the top half of the button but I can’t get the larger rectangle to the left to switch and that appears to be what controls the actual color of the item I care about. I’ve tried dragging, clicking and selecting command d using the eye dropper but nothing works. I realize that it’s probably something really simple but even a paragraph of help would be really nice.

The one on the left shows what the color started as in the exported style and it does not change. It is provided as a visual comparison only. It can be used to help you determine if your starting style was a light or dark color palette, which is important because not every single aspect of the UI is something you can set a custom value for.

It does take a bit of trial and error to get used to editing custom styles. This is a good place to ask as there are some experienced creators of custom styles here, both who use OmniFocusColors and some who edit the values by hand in the XML directly. Sorry for the confusion, and I hope this helps.