In OF3, I can have my custom perspective show tasks of a selected tag from the sidebar. Now in OF4, because the perspective view menu doesn’t have a “save” button, there isn’t a way for me to save the particular view exactly like I want it. Every time I open the perspective, none of the tags are selected in the sidebar, so all of them are shown.
If it’s only one tag (like the example I gave in my original post), I can set the perspective view to be ungrouped. So it’s not a problem.
But for multiple tags, I want to see the tag groupings of ONLY the tags I want to help me make decisions.
This can apply to different use cases, but an example is that I have a few different tags to mark tasks I want to work on at varying levels of urgency (“This Week”, “Bump”, “Parked”). As part of my morning workflow to identify tasks to work on for the day, one perspective that I use would filter tasks with “Bump” and “This Week” tags, grouped by Tag. By default, the perspective would show all Tag groups, include other context (see first image). But instead, I want to see only the “Bump” and “This Week” tag groups (see second image). I want those two tags selected by default, but currently, the tag selections are cleared every time I go back to the perspective.
I know I can make two separate perspectives, one for “Bump” and one for “This Week” and do this workflow in two separate steps, but being able to see multiple tags at the same time allows me to look at all the tasks and decide which I want to work on today.
This is a Mac only bug. OF4 is supposed to remember the sidebar selection.
This works correctly on the iPhone and iPad, but stopped working on the Mac as some point recently. So far, I am the only person who has reported it to the Omnigroup.
Please send this in to support so they have another data point, and hopefully fix this soon.
I’ve been working with support, and we have determined that if you favorite the perspectives you want to have remember their tag section, it will work as intended. I am assuming this is a bug.
@bhupesh Yes that’s what I’m experiencing too: tag selections stay if perspective is favorited, but are forgotten if it’s not favorited. Thank you for pointing that out.
All these “bugs” or “not universal” or otherwise undocumented behaviors are just crutches. This should be straightforward to do but it isn’t because, as great as OF is, it is too prescriptive.
This should be a simple: “SELECT tasks FROM all tasks WHERE x AND y AND tag = {a, b, or c}, GROUP BY project, SORT BY project ASCENDING” or whatever. It should be part of the definition of the perspective, not have to rely on an undocumented behavior.
This is why I keep clamoring for an “advanced” mode that let’s us write any SQL-like query.
Show me all actions that are available today, are in the inbox or an active project, is in the inbox or has the Today tag or is flagged or is due within the next 48 hours, group first by due soon, then by flagged, then by inbox, then by project, sort initially by project ascending.
Yes, for new users, it should continue to offer “standard” flexibility but for advanced users it should be simply a DB with a (very good looking!) query-driven visualization UI on top.