Overall, how are you liking OmniFocus 2 relative to OmniFocus 1?

mariva · May 20, 2014, 7:45pm

[I emailed the message below directly to OmniFocus Preview.]

OmniFocus is very important to me; in fact, it’s the most significant reason for my switch from Windows to Mac. (Tangentially, several years ago at the Macworld Expo, I begged the OmniFocus product managers to develop a Windows version, but they said it wouldn’t happen. I don’t know what the reasoning is; developing your stellar products for Windows would open up a huge new market for Omni Group.)

In any case, I have many thoughts and questions about OmniFocus 2. I’ll start with the good news (“Improvements”) and move onto problems and suggestions. Please let me know if you have any questions.

IMPROVEMENTS:

Convenient, elegant vertical button bar for perspectives along the left side of the sidebar. I also appreciate the ability to assign quick and easy shortcuts to each perspective.
Simplified many shortcuts: especially access to Sidebar, Outline, and Inspector.
Flattened, simplified look of perspective icons.
Icons & shortcuts for Quick Open, Focus, and View.
Forecast view. I haven’t used this much yet, but I appreciate its potential.
There’s no more “Due” perspective. Is that because it’s unnecessary and superseded by the Forecast? That’s probably a good thing.
Anonymize Database: This is a valuable feature – especially for privacy concerns, tech support, productivity blogs, OmniFocus examples and theme-sharing, and so on.

COLLAPSE/EXPANSION:

The biggest problem is the inability to remember the sidebar format. Specifically, contexts and projects should appear collapsed or expanded according to user preference.

In response to the question posed by Omni Staff member “Lizard”, I commented:

I would like there to be a choice between snapshots and “remember my last view.” Since a user can’t do both at the same time, this choice would have to be a toggle: either snapshots or last view. Leave it up to the user to decide.

As you can see from the multiple discussion threads, the collapse/expansion “amnesia” is a problem for many users:

GRAPHIC INTERFACE:

The textual design looks messy and cluttered. The name of the Project that appears below a task looks like a note. It also consumes valuable vertical space while wasting horizontal space. With regard to the layout of tasks, the design of OmniFocus 1 was superior. (FYI: I always maximize the OmniFocus window. Perhaps the new design works better with smaller OmniFocus windows, I don’t know.)
The disclosure triangle for the note is way too small. This is especially difficult for visually impaired users. (I noticed that you can either click the disclosure triangle itself or the little note icon to its immediate right for the same effect; this is confusing and seems redundant.)
The Flag icon is too close to Check Complete icon. It’s too easy to check complete when I’m attempting to flag an item.
Why is the Check Complete icon now a huge circle? This is not intuitive.
If nothing is due on a particular day, the Forecast perspective does not need to display “no items” under the date. This needlessly adds to the textual clutter.
Add more icons to Perspective choices, and explain the ones that are included. (What is the suitcase with a star on it? Why is there something that looks like a shiny baseball?) Also, do all of the user-chosen icons have to be teal-colored? Why not offer icons in different colors? For example, see OmniFocus 2 Perspective Icons.
The two different text colors for single-action list tasks (black) and projects tasks gray is confusing. (This could be addressed by restoring the ability to customize the look. See my suggestion below in “UX Design”.)

UX DESIGN:

When changing times on deferred or due dates in the miniature monthly calendar view, the cursor goes directly to the minutes field, which is frustrating and inconvenient. (It went to the hours field in OmniFocus 1, which makes much more sense.)
When viewing a list of tasks, why is there no display of contexts as there was in OmniFocus 1? (If you do decide to restore the context to the task view, please don’t put it under the name of the project – that would just eat up more vertical space and look even more cluttered! Add the project name and context to the right of the task name, just as it was before.)
Why are tasks for today called “Available”? That’s a strange choice of wording. Why not just call it “Today”? It’s not that the task is “available” – it’s that today, I am available to do the task.

In the Notifications, I’m seeing: “Available: Task X” or “Available: 7 Items.” This is so jarring to me that I turned off Notifications just to eliminate the momentary confusion I feel every time I see it. How about the Notification just displaying “Task X”? Please re-think this “Available” wording.
Still no multicolored flags? Please allow the option to flag a task with a colored flag. The standard seven colors of Apple should suffice (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, and gray). As with Finder and Apple Mail, users should have the option of custom-labeling the flags.
Still no tags? For the record, I do understand the GTD-centric argument against tags – but the option would benefit users who adapt OmniFocus to their own mix-and-match approaches to task management. Keep in mind that tags don’t necessarily have to be (multiple) contexts. Each task can be assigned one main context and several optional tags.
Restore the ability to customize the look (fonts, colors, etc.) and create themes. See:
Add custom fonts, colors, stylings in the Outline view
OmniFocus Themes
Please show the total number of items in each folder – (including the entire Library!) – project, and single-action list. This would be useful if a user has way too many projects and needs to hold or drop some of them. (Correction: I think this feature may already exist – at the bottom bar of the window.)
The Flagged perspective should allow sorting by deferred date (without any grouping) or by project. I would have to create a new custom perspective in order to accomplish this. In general, it seems as though perspectives are much less flexible than they were in OmniFocus 1.
In the Reviews perspective, please allow the display of future reviews, not just immediate ones. My discussion comment:

I miss seeing the “future Reviews” as well. It’s startling to see “0” when I click the “Review” tab. Sometimes I perform a “meta-review,” in that I review how often my projects need to be reviewed. The Review perspective in OmniFocus 1 was very helpful this way.
With a New Window, enable a preference to:
1. bring up the same window as the last view (current default), or
2. a generic new window.
Often, tasks remain highlighted/selected even though I’ve Deselected All.
If I’m viewing a project in a new window, the title bar of that new window should display the name of that specific project, not just the generic “Projects.” (The title bar is specific for a new Focus window, but not if I select a task and select “Show in Projects” from the contextual menu.)
In View, another radio button should be added between Available and Remaining. This new view should display tasks that are both available and deferred – but not blocked or on hold.
The deferred time is not displayed next to the deferred date unless I mouse over each one. It would be better to enable “show time” as a preference.
Show Perspectives >> Settings icon >> Delete Perspective is obscured and too much work.
Update: (I emailed this new bug that I found to OmniFocus Preview.) Quick Open was working normally – (so I thought) – and then today I noticed that it searches for individual characters – separately – rather than for cohesive strings of text. For example, a search for “pride” brings up “projects” (PR) and “videotapes” (IDE), and a search for “nert” brings up “finance” (N) and “property” (ERT). Quick Open would be an exceptionally useful feature – but this bug renders it useless.