Tedious and outdated interface for iPhone

I find the user interface for the iPhone horribly inadequate for the reasons below:

1. It is not possible to view your folders, projects, tasks and subtasks in one view reflecting their various hierarchies.

I find the need to dive down the hierarchy of folders, projects, tasks, and subtasks level by level extremely tedious and it doesnt give me a clear big picture overview of all my projects and tasks. I dont believe that this is a limitation of the size of the iPhones as there are other task management apps which have done a very good job with this. Case in point, take a look at the new Todoist which all your subtasks and the hierarchies are nicely laid out in a single window.

2. Takes too many steps to edit tasks

I’m not able to easily shift tasks around to create subtasks or create parent tasks by drag and drop. There are quite a number of apps that allow this. The OF UI is extremely dated.

3. No bulk edit

The app doesn’t allow bulk editing. Again, there are many other task management apps that allow this.

The only reason why I keep coming back to OF is because (and for reasons I cannot comprehend) many of the cloud services do not support start dates. I believe I speak for a not insignificant number of OF users. While other task management apps have improved leaps and bounds by adding features and improving usability, the OF apps (including the Mac app but especially the iPhone app which was already dated in its design at inception) has remained largely stagnant with slow and few improvements to features and usability. I wonder if Omnigroup has tried any of its many other competitors (e.g. Todoist, 2Do) because if they have, they would have come to the realisation that the iPhone user interface is extremely dated and tedious to use. The iPhone app feels like an afterthought and it seems like Omnigroup is relying on all its users to also buy either the Mac or iPad apps as the primary app for editing and managing your tasks.

They really need to do something about this soon.

1 Like
  1. Agreed
  2. Agreed
  3. Agreed

There could be something like a contest for best ideas to improve flow in OF for iOS

I think all of the problems you list are also on the iPad app.

I agree, the iOSX platforms could benefit by improvements in each case.

I agree, OF on the iOSX platform is clumsier to use than it really should be, especially this far in to the age if the iOSX devices. For example … drag and drop of a content item is not supported on a touch device … say what!!!

Regardless that folks may agree with your sentiments (as I mostly do), I suspect that some (if not many) will disagree with the strengths of your opinions, especially the hyperbole statements of “leaps and bounds” and “largely stagnant” and “slow and few”.

And I have not been one to be coddling OmniGroup about their lack of developments.

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JJW

Yes, Yes, and Yes! When I heard that iOS was getting a sidebar I was stoked, but it turns out it’s essentially the least useful version of the implementation you could imagine. If you select context view, for instance, the sidebar should transform to show you the heirarchy of contexts, and same with projects; when you select a view, it should expand that heirarchy. If you want to see the other views, you can just hit a back button that would pop up. Instead it shows you nothing. Hey, I’m glad omnifocus is letting me know that contexts are still a thing… x.x

Yeah, and then it comes to the “edit” (rearrangement) menu, there should be a checkbox that appears so you can grab multiple items, and then hit a button to make a change to many items. There should be the same thing to see multiple projects/contexts at once.

At least the flagged menu is now sorted by context. That and landscape have been a really really long time coming.