I will admit that I have not gotten very far with v2. I installed it on my work computer and went back to v1 almost immediately, thinking “I can’t use this if I want to accomplish anything today.” I’m posting this because I think my reasons for fleeing so soon are not the common complaints that have appeared in earlier posts in this thread. Instead: I cannot use OmniFocus 2 as it exists now because it simply is missing my most commonly used features.
My OmniFocus 1 workflow revolves around frequently switching the project and item availability view filters. My database (and brain) is organized so that putting together combinations like “active projects, remaining items” or “remaining projects, next action” lets me evaluate my tasks and complete my work. I rely on this so much that I added keyboard shortcuts for them. I checked my Keyboard Maestro logs and saw that I fired those shortcuts over 100 times on my work computer alone last week. Unless I am completely missing something, the only way to accomplish this in v2 is by three mouse clicks, delving into the View popover, which obscures most of the relevant data of what I want to filter anyway! I feel like this has eliminated a lot of the GTD power of OmniFocus.
A possible solution would be moving the View popover into the right sidebar. Then View and Inspect would work much like Format and Document in Pages 5 (upon which OmniFocus is clearly — and rightly — drawing much inspiration for its interface). Returning View options to the menubar would also be useful so they can be accessed by key commands.
I also see that item metadata entry will be a huge problem, and again, likely a GTD issue. When I capture tasks, I don’t fuss about their context, start date, and due date. However, once they are in a project, I should be able to add that information quickly. But with no columns, pressing the down arrow is roulette w.r.t. which metadata field you will alight on in the next task. There is no way that the keystrokes used to do this can be as simple as “1d [down] 1d [down] 3d [down] 1w [down]” etc. as in v1.
tl;dr The public preview feels like Pages 5.0: beautiful, feature-bare, and completely unusable. On the other hand, I’m really happy with Pages 5.2, and hopefully the same will happen by the time of the 2.0 final release.
I might not have perfectly understood your problem with switching the view filters, but have you tried saving these as separate perspectives and then placing the icons for those perspectives on the toolbar? That’s how I switch around, and it’s one keystroke each time.
Also, you can open up the Perspectives pane and assign a keystroke to each perspective if you’d rather stay on the keyboard.
I’d second what @rogbar suggested. Rather than twiddling those settings on the fly repeatedly, spend some time with the Perspectives system and let us know if there are specific combinations you could achieve under version 1 but can’t under v2.
Assuming the method you used in v1 required two keystrokes for each combo as your example would seem to imply, you should be able to instantly cut that in half by setting the combos up as Perspectives and giving each of them shortcuts.
Moved these posts to a new topic because it seems like it could be helpful to other folks w/similar workflows and who might not see it in the more general thread it started out in.
Since we’re past feature freeze and UI freeze, I doubt you’ll be much happier with the feature set at 2.0 final release. (We’re mostly fixing crashes and other bugs.) But, just as Pages has matured since 5.0 and many of our other apps matured from 1.0 to 1.10 or 5.0 to 5.4, OmniFocus 2.0 is not intended to be a final resting place.
I, too, rely heavily on switching between ‘available’ and ‘remaining’ tasks using the Availability Filter in OF1. I have a ton of tasks that are either hidden because of future start dates or because they are assigned to an on hold context and I generally prefer not to see those most of the time.
However, frequently I am viewing the tasks of a given project and I am wondering, for instance, “Did I already add that future task (which would not be visible with my current view settings)?”. For OF1, I have created a Keyboard Maestro macro that allows me to quickly switch the filter to remaining tasks and then right back to available tasks, all without losing the currently selected project or changing anything else about my current view. This is extremely convenient and I use it all the time.
If I try to do the same in OF2 by switching perspectives, as you guys suggest, I always lose the currently selected project, which I find very distracting. So the only option left is to invoke the View pop-up window in OF2 and change the “Filter by availability” setting manually using the mouse, which takes much much longer than my single keystroke in OF1 and introduces a lot of friction, especially because I do this switching a lot.
For me to be happy, all I would need is for the toggles (especially the one for task availability) in the View pop-up menu to be available through the regular menu bar, so that I can change them using Keyboard Maestro.
