Upgrade now or later?

I’ve had this on my mind for a while and thought id reach out to the omnifocus community to see what they thought about it. I know it might not be possible to answer my question with absolute certainty but id really appreciate the insight of others.

I currently have Omnifocus for Mac and Omnifocus for iPhone. Im getting to the point where id benefit from the pro versions of the app. For my to upgrade to the universal from the legacy iOS app and then upgrade to pro will cost me £45. To then upgrade the Mac app would cost me ~£30. Thats £75 in total. At first I felt that this price was a little steep but I really love omnifocus and have decided to invest in it and make sure that I get the full value out of it.

The one thing that is holding me back is the fear that omnifocus 3 is round the corner. I know some will say that I can just carry on with version 2 but with the rapid pace of development of iOS and OS X I don’t want to run the risk of running legacy software that may break(I have been bitten by this in the past), I like to be on current versions.

I hope I don’t sound petty here, its just I don’t earn a lot of money and like to be smart with how I spend it.

So am I best waiting for V3 or is V2 going to be a rolling update over the next few years?

Good decision to upgrade – the pro versions are great, and I’m sure you will be happy with them. The Omni Group has a nice tradition of offering many free updates for a long time between new paid versions, as @wilsonng demonstrates in this post:

Upgrade frequency and associated cost

The Omni Group also has a nice tradition of special offers to late buyers of the previous version, so that those will not feel cheated. I think it should be safe to buy now, and I recommend you to do so, as you otherwise might have to wait for a long for features that would serve you today.

Omnifocus 2 for Mac is a more mature product with less need of development than Omnifocus 2 for IOS, so my guess is that a release of Omnifocus 3 for IOS will come sooner.

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Indeed OmniFocus 3 for iOS may be around the corner. @kcase hasn’t said that this redesign is going to be a paid upgrade, but you might want to ask him before jumping in.

If, though, this upgrade were indeed to come by year’s end, you’d likely be in the free upgrade window (six months).

I’m looking at the tweet and it doesn’t look like OmniFocus 3 is around the corner. It’s more likely that the major design change is the addition of multiple tags that many people have been waiting for. The iOS edition’s big change will finally be batch editing.

Refer to the Looking Ahead At 2017 section from the Omnigroup blog post:


[quote]This summer, OmniFocus will be ten years old. We’ve improved a lot of things about the app over those ten years, but to maintain file format compatibility there are some things about the way we work with the app that haven’t ever changed. Last year we laid the groundwork for finally changing some of those, when we switched to a new, extensible file format and added encryption. This year, we’re going to make some fundamental improvements to the data OmniFocus keeps track of. Based on your feedback, the database changes currently at the top of our list are:

  • Faster syncing of databases with large attachments (so people who use lots of large attachments no longer have their sync times get longer and longer)
  • Support for multiple tags on tasks and projects (rather than just a single context)
  • More flexible repeats and notifications (such as “third Thursday of the month” and “keep reminding me every ten minutes until I check this off”)
    [/quote]

There’s still a lot of juice left in OmniFocus 2 (as I remove my shoe and prepare to stick it in my mouth if pigs fly).

OmniFocus 2 is a mature product now. It’s easier to work with a mature app over an app that just got released and will have its typical birthing pains.

And I seem to recall Ken saying that multiple contexts were on the roadmap for 2.x, but I can’t find it anywhere.