Suggestions for running both v1 and v2 on the same system?

OmniFocus OmniFocus for Mac
#1

Happy to be part of the OF 2.0 beta.

However, like many of you, need to balance the desire to beta-test, with the need to keep my daily OF work safe.

Any suggestions (beyond the other posting in this section regarding not synching OF 2.0) for having both versions living side by side? Will OF 2.0 overwrite the plist file? What about Application Support files? Any suggestions appreciated.

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#2

  1. I’m still testing this, but what I did so far is to rename the existing OmniFocus.app to OF1.app. I chose to renaming this one instead of the beta as I assume beta updates will come more often than an update to OF1.

  2. After playing a bit with the beta, I have relaunched OF1 and everything seemed to be in place. So I assume the new version doesn’t overwrite the plist. On the other hand though, I haven’t found a new plist file so I’m not really sure how this works.

  3. In the initial incarnation of the beta, you could synchronize both apps. I’m still running through the default db, but I’m planning to try to sync the db next.

#3

Because OmniFocus 2 for Mac uses Apple’s security sandbox, it stores its preferences and database in a different location than OmniFocus 1. I’ve been running both versions side-by-side for the last several months of development without any trouble. (One thing to watch for though, if both versions are running at once you can get two Quick Entry windows for the price of one when you hit the QE shortcut key combination. That doesn’t cause any damage, but it is a bit surprising.)

#4

Software update tries to do something intelligent. If you have ‘OmniFocus’ and ‘OmniFocus 2’ in your Applications folder and then run let the software update do its thing, you’ll end up with ‘OmniFocus 1.10.6’ and ‘OmniFocus’, respectively. (If that goes wrong, you should be able to redownload OF2 from omnistaging and OF1 from our main download page or the Mac App Store as appropriate.)

Now that OmniFocus 2 is sandboxed, it’s probably slightly less likely to misbehave if you let it have the name ‘OmniFocus’, but I don’t know of any specific issues there off the top of my head.

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