There was some concern that people might be confused about seeing the Inbox in multiple places. This lets people opt into that behavior, at which point it seems reasonably likely that they won’t be confused by their choice.
5 Likes
It’ll be quite sad to see this thread go It’s been here since the launch of OF2 :-)
3 Likes
Finally.
At last we have the answer to Omni’s apparent disinterest in this problem: @kcase mistyped 2.10 as 2.1 all those years ago.
2 Likes
Will the change in OF on the Mac be reflected in the UI on iOS? I.E. - will i see the inbox on my iPad and IPhone?
Thanks. You are appreciated and so is this change.
1 Like
I almost really love this feature. A few things to consider in the user experience:
- If I now do inbox processing in the Projects perspective (which makes sense), then what is the Inbox perspective for?
- Considering the above, might it make more sense to add the project hierarchy to the Inbox perspective instead of adding the Inbox to the Projects perspective?
- If not, the Inbox perspective seems orphaned/weird/out of place now (though I get grandfathering the existing experience)
- As a workaround to all of the above, could the Inbox be treated as a project so that I could make a project-based perspective with a Focus on Inbox?
I love the spirit of this change, but it appears to be based on the display of things together as opposed to making things really work together, if that makes sense. I’ll certainly keep using it, and this is a great start, but I think there is still a lot of opportunity here.
Cheers,
ScottyJ
2 Likes
Everything you point out here totally makes sense, and we’ve had long internal debates about all of those points (and others). That feeling of this solution (and many others) not quite being right is why it’s taken so long to make this change: we kept wanting to come up with a better solution that fit our overall design better. “Perfect is the enemy of the good,” and striving for perfection here has already delayed a simple “good” solution for this problem far longer than it should have.
(We did think about automatically hiding the Inbox perspective when you decide to show the Inbox in projects—so you’d be moving it, rather than cloning it—but I think that’s more disruptive to people’s workflows than is really necessary. And anyone who prefers to hide the potentially-redundant Inbox perspective can easily make that change for themselves.)
P.S. — We do think you should be able to add the Inbox to your focus, both for window focus and perspective focus. We’ve filed that as a planned feature, but that’s a deeper change and I didn’t want to delay getting this out.
1 Like
Thanks for the thoughtful response, @kcase!
Maybe I’m thinking too architecturally, but to me, the ideal treatment of Inbox would for it to be a project. Basically, the default project for anything (anything not explicitly assigned to anything else is therefore assigned to Inbox), and in that way, it could be added to focus, a perspective for it could be made stock, etc.
But that’s me, maybe others have a different vision for this, and I can’t understand the complexities of things being made to work that way.
Keep up the great work!
1 Like
Inbox does behave a lot like a (single-action-list) project, but it does has a few special behaviors, the most obvious of which is that the Inbox perspective shows the Projects column (which is considered redundant in the Projects perspective, where a task’s assigned project is represented by its location in the outline). Also note that you can have items in the inbox that also have a project tentatively assigned to them, because your cleanup preferences dictate that they should remain in your Inbox until you’ve also assigned a context. (That’s something that certainly doesn’t happen with normal projects! And I’m guessing most people never touch that preference, so for most people the Inbox does behave very much like single-action-list projects.)
There used to be more Inbox limitations in OmniFocus 1.0 (inbox items would never be considered a next action, the inbox would ignore your current filter, etc.), but we’ve relaxed/removed a lot of those limitations/exceptions (and in the process made the app a lot easier for people to understand) over the last ten years as we’ve gotten more experience with the different ways people use the app. (That’s one of the big benefits to providing free phone support: we get to hear from a lot of people about where remaining points of friction are when they use our apps.)
3 Likes
Well, I guess that’s as close to an apology for the last three years as we’re going to get.
Did my Weekly Review this morning: first time using OF2 that it hasn’t been an exercise in irritation and frustration. I feel like I’ve got OmniFocus back.
2 Likes
I certainly appreciate the amount of careful consideration and deliberation that Omnigroup puts into when trying to juggle feature requests and how it can impact user workflows.
Every feature request is considered carefully. Adding one feature means looking at its impact to the overall workflow.
But I am sure glad they finally reconsidered after much deliberation and put it in now.
3 Likes
Thank you for making this a reality!
I’m not going to “pile on” with criticism, rather I prefer just to express appreciation. It’s basic, it’s functional and meets the requirements. Is there room for improvement (based on some of the discussion in this thread)? Sure.
But for now, this is quite helpful for all who have been waiting patiently (well, perhaps not that patiently).
Thanks again,
Rique
4 Likes
What I miss in this implementation is ability to see Inbox along with a project-focused project perspective.
I can’t fault bringing back the OF1 behavior, but having the Inbox items front and center always made it difficult for me to not process those items immediately. If the “Show Inbox” option were a perspective setting instead of a global one, that might help with that.
I keep thinking a good idea might be a shelf (maybe a slide up bottom pane), where you have quick access to Inbox items, and can “stash” tasks from existing projects. That would make Inbox to Projects processing easy, but also facilitate scheduling tasks in Forecast or setting Contexts.
1 Like
Hallelujah. With 2.10, we can now “Show Inbox” in the Projects perspective. Solves my problems!!! Thanks so much OF!
Craig
@kcase could you please fix this sooner rather than later?
If I click the Inbox Perspective, it doesn’t show the sidebar.
If I build a custom perspective highlighting the Inbox in the project view, it hides the inbox when I invoke the custom perspective.
Yeah, I know I can click the project perspective and then scroll up to the inbox and click on it. I’d like a workflow that deafults to the obvious desired behavior: show me the inbox contents and the projects in the sidebar.
1 Like
I can confirm @anamorph’s bug report.
The new “inbox as a project” feature doesn’t seem to be supported by perspectives. AFAICT there is no way to add the Inbox project to a custom perspective.
Edit: D’oh! It’s worse than I thought, but at least it’s already known:
I work exclusively from a single Custom Perspective on all my devices: this perspective basically generates my daily list of (recurring) todos and (scheduled) project tasks. Except for my weekly Review or when I’m creating and planning tasks i rarely dig into Projects or Contexts view.
After an organic process of getting accustomed to Omnifocus over the years my Custom Perspective has become my ideal workflow: the list is simple and straightforward as something Things did for me years back while being able to add the more advanced features Omnifocus has to offer.
Downside of this approach always has been: the inbox. Its nowhere visible inside this flow.I have to remind myself (actually, also a task on the daily list) to review the inbox and sort out captured items. (its usually worse: i capture in a separate note taking app and add it to OF later).
I was very excited (as a kid before xmas) when i heard about the inbox integration in the upcoming 2.10 release. Been checking updates frequently and today its finally here…hoping of course i could do some manipulation making the inbox items appear on my Custom Perspective… but alas… (
From a traditional GTD standpoint (how the original Omnifocus was designed) i can understand the architecture: and i admit, i don’t use Omnifocus as ‘i should’ or according to any GTD standard.But…with the addition of Custom Perspectives and not being able to get insight in inbox items here i feel its actually a ‘design flaw’ that should be addressed. Omnifocus allowed me to get outside the standard structure but doesn’t allow me to include the most relevant component: the inbox.
If this could be added in a future update this would really really really make Omnifocus ideal.
Im sure there is a more fancy approach to this but a simple toggle setting for any Custom Perspective where inbox items get listed on top of the perspective list would do it for me.
Or even a single line on top that shows how many items are waiting in the inbox with a direct clickthrough: just to remind me the inbox exists and is part of the flow.
ps. i don’t want to be the person that finally posts on a product forum only to complain about some missing feature. So guys: omnifocus i love it, it runs my life and i can’t imagine how people run theirs without it. Seriously.
4 Likes
This topic was automatically closed 7 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
