Test builds of OmniFocus 2.5 are now available! [2.5 Final released 2016-03-30]

Thanks for helping us test! This release adds a Style Preference Pane, where you can choose between built-in font and color collections or import and export your own.

  • new - Styles — Added a Style Preference Pane, where you can choose between built-in font and color collections or import and export your own.
  • new - Sync — Added a quiescence timer so that we can block integrating sync changes while you are actively typing (these integrations could cause inadvertent deletion, especially in notes and titles).
  • fixed - Project Order — Fixed a long-standing bug where the order of Projects would get re-arranged temporarily. This also sometimes affected re-ordering the sidebar manually.
  • fixed - Sync Setup — We now present a helpful error when an account can’t be found, rather than a rather un-helpful one.
  • fixed - Inspector — Inspector text fields (including Note) now retain focus switching between applications.
  • fixed - Search — The Go to Search Field menu item no longer stops working after editing the toolbar.
  • fixed - TextExpander — Fill-in Snippets once again work in the Sidebar.
  • updated - Calendar Apps — When clicking “View in Calendar”, if Fantastical or BusyCal is set as your default calendar app, the day containing the event being inspected will be opened in that application instead of Apple Calendar.
  • updated - Type-Ahead Selection — Type-ahead selection has been disabled to avoid some situations where it could result in inadvertent deletion of items.
  • updated - Outlining Keyboard Shortcuts — Bare reorganize right ‘r’ in the sidebar outline is now disabled if the operation would cause the item’s type to be converted and disappear from the sidebar.
  • updated - Localizations — Localized some previously-un-localized items. More work remains.

Download from https://omnistaging.omnigroup.com/omnifocus.

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A post was split to a new topic: What does “bare reorganize right” refer to?

For those who might be interested in editing their own themes, we have an unsupported tool that makes editing the colors a lot easier. Just export the current style from Style Preferences, then open the resulting document in OmniFocusColors.app.

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You do realize that I could get lost for days (in a good way) with this, right? :) A little more seriously – is there a way to specify more fonts than the three provided?

Thanks for doing this! I know a lot of people have been asking for this for quite a while. I appreciate you being so responsive to customer requests!!

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Any chance we can get rid of the bondi blue font and icon colors? Also, I love dark mode on iOS except for the bondi blue color. I think it clashes with the black. All the other colors are great. Would be nice if the custom perspective colors were the same as projects or the inbox.

Ken, do I undestand correctly that there is no font size customization yet, but it is planned for soon?

As for colours, I failed to find how to customise action notes color in the main window. Am I missing something?

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Yes, there certainly is! In Style Preferences, click on the Export Current Style… button to get this export dialog:

This will export an .ofocus-style XML file which has all sorts of tweakable settings, including the font name choices:

  <key>font-name-aliases</key>
  <dict>
  	<key>light</key>
  	<string>ApproximaOverdrive-Light</string>
  	<key>light-italic</key>
  	<string>ApproximaOverdrive-LightIt</string>
  	<key>regular</key>
  	<string>ApproximaOverdrive-Regular</string>
  	<key>regular-italic</key>
  	<string>ApproximaOverdrive-RegularIt</string>
  	<key>semibold</key>
  	<string>ApproximaOverdrive-Semibold</string>
  	<key>semibold-italic</key>
  	<string>ApproximaOverdrive-SemiboldIt</string>
  </dict>

You should be able to change those to whatever font name you wish, then load them back into OmniFocus by dragging the .ofocus-style document back onto the app icon or clicking the Import Style… button in Style Preferences. Once that’s done, be sure to choose your new collection from the Font Collection popup!

It’s configurable in the .ofocus-style XML. Each type of thing has a collection of five sizes, like this set of sizes for the action title:

  	<key>OFITextStyleActionTitle</key>
  	<dict>
  		<key>content-sizes</key>
  		<array>
  			<real>11</real>
  			<real>12</real>
  			<real>14</real>
  			<real>16</real>
  			<real>17</real>
  		</array>
  		<key>font-name</key>
  		<string>regular</string>
  	</dict>

Those five sizes correspond to the five positions of the font size slider in Style Preferences, so in this case the smallest size from that slider is 11pt while the largest is 17pt.

Adjusting a font size has a lot of layout consequences, so further down in the XML you’ll find a place where you can also adjust the layout constraints for each of those sizes:

layoutConstraintConstants

ExtraLarge

bottomPaddingForActionCells
3
bottomPaddingForColumnarActionCells
3
bottomPaddingForContextCells
3
bottomPaddingForForecastDayCells
6
bottomPaddingForForecastDaySectionCells

  	…

  	<key>verticalSpaceBetweenTitleAndMetadataRowForProjectCells</key>
  	<real>3</real>
  	<key>verticalSpaceBetweenTitleFieldAndNoteViewForColumnarActionCells</key>
  	<real>1</real>
  	<key>widthScalingRatioForMetadataColumns</key>
  	<real>0.94999999999999996</real>

You’ll find versions of all those for each of the five positions of the slider (Extra Small, Small, Medium, Large, and Extra Large), and tuning all of those to get everything looking just right at each size for each font collection is the reason it’s taken us so long to offer more than one font choice! (And it’s also why there are still some layout bugs in some of the alternate font collections.)

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Thanks for such a detailed reply, Ken!

Could you also detail on Notes a bit?

As for colours, I failed to find how to customise action notes color in the main window. Am I missing something?

Thanks a lot for this! I guess that I’ll have to update http://ofthemes.com to support OF2 instead.

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Notes use the “faded” text color as their base color:

You might have to quit and restart the app to get it to notice a change to this setting.

When I click Export button, OF crashes literally every time. Sent several crash reports on that.

Thanks for the crash reports! It turns out this was caused by a bug in Swift on OS X 10.10, which we didn’t catch sooner because we’d been working on 10.11. Fortunately, once we knew about this problem there was an easy workaround. It’s now fixed in the latest test build.

Hi! Just wondering if there is any way we can customise the colour of the “Note” button?
Also, in dark mode, the text shadow in status bar should be removed for clarity I think.

There’s a lot of real progress there, but content is still being pushed into a secondary layer by some attention-seeking deco.

Most of that can be quickly cleaned up, but an obdurate residue of slightly cheesy pictorialism (perhaps intended as decoration ?) does persist, and might need something stronger than an off-the-shelf household cleaner.

Quick fixes

  1. Toolbar: text only
  2. Sidebar tab icons - delete all from the application resources folder
  3. ‘perspective’ icons - ditto ( most are in their own sub-folder )

Remaining problems

  • All of the frilly ‘line and fill’ folder and project type (etc) icons (e.g. six contrasting edges for a disclosure triangle, when the eye gets the point with three, as in OS X
    OmniOutliner, though iOS OO did not escape the turn to deco)
  • The gratuitously pictorial ‘flag’ icon. An orange dot would be more than enough.
  • The redundant flag ornament at top right of completion circles
  • The over-drawn and slightly unconvincing or over-assertive check icon.

Solutions ?

  • Would it be possible to directly replace the open and closed folder pictures with the clearer and simpler disclosure icons from OO ? (I haven’t tried)
  • Perhaps an alternative set of simple clear (non deco-pic) icons which just use the minimum effective number of lines and levels of contrast ?

Thanks a lot! Finally, with the new theming engine I can at least try to minimally use OF2, which is a huge contrast to the previous “completely unable to use”.

Some points, in no particular order:

  • action row height slightly collapses when I try to edit action title in-line; expands when I’m done editing. Related, when I move from one action to another while still editing their action titles, the titles “jump” up and down. Happens even with the build-in font collection on a largest size setting in Preferences dialog; both in Fluid and Custom-Columns layout. Update: reproduces only for multi-line actions.

  • for Custom-Columns layout, is there any way to hide “note” icon when there is no note contained for an action (but still show the icon when the note is there)? I can not imagine to use the icon to open note editor, as I’m heavy user of keyboard shortcuts

  • speaking of shortcuts, isn’t there an option to use old-school Alt-’ combination for Note show-hide? Alternatively, will system-preferences way to re-assign it to older combination work?

  • for Fluid layout, any way to get rid of full-height spacing under each action title? Screen space looks really wasted, with its own way for each layout: double-height for Fluid; space for columns for Custom-Columns. Personally I only attach context / {due|defered} date to 10-20% of items, and need to see it only when it’s there–but not waste screen real estate for the remaining 80-90% of actions. So in Fluid layout, I would prefer those attributes to be shown right to the action title, in line with it – and only claim extra height when there’s not enough space left from the action title. How popular is this request, given that the 2.x layout is well over year old now? Update: and I undestand this is not about reduced functionality compared to 1.x, so it should be treated as a separate feature request, of course.

How can we determine the names of the fonts we’d like to use? Proxima Nova (in the Prefs pane) > ApproximaOverdrive-Regular (in the exported XML) isn’t exactly obvious. :)

I’m trying to like the Dark Mode in the 2.5 beta, however, it just seems so much busier to me than the light version.

Especially whenever I have the Inspector visible, there are so many light outlines to the boxes that it just seems even worse. I don’t know if that’s because I have Tab Focus set in my System Preferences to have All controls instead of just Text boxes and lists only.

Does anyone have any suggestions…?

Scott

I’m mostly done with a theme that makes a few subtle color changes to OF Light, and lots of spacing/font tweaks to the System Font, if anyone wants to kick the tires:

Download Theme

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Its just font file name. For example, SourceSansPro-It for source sans pro italic. You can check your fonts folder.

Thanks; doesn’t work for me — with or without “.otf” suffixes. E.g.:

<key>OFITextStyleForecastCalendarEventTitle</key>
<dict>
	<key>font-name</key>
	<string>IdealSans-Light-Pro.otf</string>
	<key>font-size</key>
	<real>12</real>
</dict>

(As one of many examples…) results in errors when opening the .ofocus-style file in OmniFocus:

The following fonts used by the style are not available:
• IdealSans-Light-Pro.otf
• IdealSans-Medium-Pro.otf

The following text styles defined by the style can't be instantiated:
• OFITextStyleActionGroupTitle
• OFITextStyleActionTitle
• OFITextStyleCollationGroupTitle
• OFITextStyleContextTitle
• OFITextStyleFolderTitle
• OFITextStyleForecastCalendarEventTitle
• OFITextStyleForecastEventTimelineGridlineLabel
• OFITextStyleForecastMinorCollationGroupTitle
• OFITextStyleForecastSidebarLabel
• OFITextStyleForecastSidebarMiniLabel
• OFITextStyleInspectorSidebarNoteBody
• OFITextStyleMetadata
• OFITextStyleNoContentNote
• OFITextStyleNoContentTitle
• OFITextStyleNoteBody
• OFITextStyleProjectTitle
• OFITextStyleSidebarBadgeCount
• OFITextStyleSidebarTabTitle
• OFITextStyleSidebarTitle

Any other suggestions?