I disagree. This debate should never have happened as the solution should’ve been baked in from day one.
OF1 has this ability by default. To my knowledge you can’t shut it off of option it out. This has nothing to do with feature creep, but omission.
@Ruefus Being able to drag from the inbox to the projects isn’t feature creep - I agree. What is creep is having an option to decide how to move stuff from the inbox to projects. In OF1 the drag & drop was there, always. There was no way to turn it off, so adding a way to turn drag & drop on & off, (whether by making projects visible in the inbox, or making the inbox visible as a project, or whatever), would be feature creep, (or option creep).
You are right, though, that this should have been baked in from Day 1.
@Brian said:
Similar thing going on here: for someone who got over the hurdle of learning v1’s interface, doing it “the way it’s been done” probably seems fine. But we know a lot of people simply hit a wall of confusion in v1 and never got over it. Some of the changes in version 2 are meant to address the concerns of people like that.
For those of us who are set in our dragging-and-dropping ways from OF1, and maybe not seeing the forest for the trees, how did Omni envision that we would process our inboxes? How are you doing it, (I assume you’re dogfooding OF2, and have been for a while before this public beta started)?
I’ve been wondering this too. What exactly is the recommended or imagined workflow? Keyboard only?
What I personally do is available [upthread] (Viewing the Inbox at the same time as Projects? [Available in v2.10]), but I suspect that’s not really the answer you were hoping for. :-)
As I’m sure you can imagine, the folks on the design and engineering teams are quite busy these days, but I did send an email with a pointer to this thread in case they have a chance to drop by.
I have just downloaded and done some OF 2 testing. There are lots of things I like. But also some changes that will take time to get used to. I agree with most of the arguments in this thread. I prefer to see more contextual information while processing my inbox. The two-window workaround is certainly far from ideal.
Why not allow dragging Inbox items to Project lists, Context lists and Forecast dates similar to how the new tab-based Finder works in Mavericks, with automatic tab-switching and temporary auto-expansion of folders when dragging files?
1) Add inbox item(s) to an existing project: Select the item(s) in the inbox. Drag to the Project tab and hold. After a short while, the view (temporarily) switches to the Project tab project list. Drag the item(s) to the desired project. If the desired project is not immediately visible: Scroll up/down or expand folders by holding over a folder till it auto-expands, as in the Finder. Release.
2) Convert inbox item to a project in an existing project folder: Do as above, but release on a folder instead of on a project.
3) Add a context to an inbox item: Same as above, but drag to the Context tab instead.
4) Add a due date: Drag to the Forecast tab. Wait till the calendar is shown. Release on desired due date.
Preferences and modifier keys can be used to configure more specific behavior, including whether to stay on the selected tab or jump back to inbox view after completing the drag operation, whether to add a deferred or due date in the calendar view, etc.
For my workflow, I would prefer to be taken back to the inbox view after a drag operation, with the items I dragged still selected and visible in my inbox (until I do an explicit view change).
Do any of you remember back to the original demos that I did when introducing OmniFocus 1 with Merlin Mann at Tekserve or the Apple Store? Where he would talk about things he wanted to do, and I would act as his hands on the keyboard and mouse? I generally keep my hands on the keyboard, using Smart Match in the project and context fields to quickly assign things to different tasks.
When I want to add something to my “Develop OmniFocus 2 for Mac” project, I tab into the project field and type “dof2”. For filing individual actions, I find this far more efficient than dragging with the mouse.
Now, sometimes there’s a whole bunch of stuff in there that I’d like to file at once, without having to type “dof2” over and over again. In that case, I’ll just select a whole group of things with the mouse (using Command-Click to select disjoint rows), then go over to the project field in the inspector sidebar where I can type “dof2” to assign them all to the project at once. I might then follow them to that project (using the Go To button) and make sure everything in there is organized how I want it. (Or I might just mark it as needing review to come back to later.)
Of course, sometimes I really do want to do things visually with the mouse. When that’s the case, I follow the advice I’ve suggested several times in the above thread: I simply open another window and start dragging between them.
The biggest surprise to me in this thread was how many people people felt multiple windows to be an obstacle to their workflow, rather than a help. Across all my apps, I probably have at least 80 windows open right now: I’m constantly opening and closing windows, and even though I went through a round of closing several dozen Xcode windows a few hours ago (all but one, when I finished one task and started on another) I already have over two dozen windows open again. Whenever opening another window would make it easier for me to see multiple things at once or easier to drag things from one context to another or to avoid losing my context in an existing window, it would never occur to me to hesitate to open another one (or to close it as soon as I stop needing it).
Thanks for the candid replies No one seems to have made point that seems obvious to me, and I think will be obvious to any “new” OF user.
People are trained by email apps on how to process emails from an inbox into folders. Thus, most people are used to seeing a list of folders they drop their inbox mail into. This UI convention will be how most new users view the inbox in OF.
Of course there are slick keyboard shortcuts, etc, but they will be lost on the new user and while you have cut off UI changes, you might also dearly disappoint a lot of new OF users who just don’t get OF. :-(
I’ll live with 2.0 and no inbox drag and drop in a single window, but I can’t recommend anyone buy until this feature is released.
I’ve now used the recommended work around for a few days. I suppose it works quite nicely to open a separate Inbox window and ensure in preferences that whenever I open Omnifocus the Inbox small window opens up again automatically. I’ve even positioned it into the space where the Inbox actions should be, where all other actions are, so that I can see the other perspectives, rather than too far over to the left as in the actual Inbox window.
I am however still perplexed about how Omnifocus can think that doing this is a good idea, rather than using the Inbox as they have designed it, where it is useless. To be clear, I now never use the Inbox tab in my main window, since it doesn’t work. I use the second window version. A new user to Omnifocus will never do what I am doing. Why can’t you simply create what I am doing as a main inbuilt function that works within the one window?
On a giant (or multiple) screens, lots of windows is no big deal.
On a 13" MB Air, on the road sometimes in the driver’s seat in a parking lot, it’s a literal nightmare.
Ken, I appreciate your response. The reality I think that you are seeing, however, is that most individuals want and need to see and interact with their overall project structure while processing the Inbox. Opening another window is an unneccessary step, a workaround. New users will be incredibly confused with this, feeling that the Inbox is an island without obvious escape to the other great functionality of the app. Please don’t assume that the way you work is the way that others work. The crescendo of response on this issue clearly indicates otherwise. We appreciate the great effort that is going into Release 2, and I for one am generally ecstatic about how things are working and moving. This is the single largest ‘pain point’ for me in using the application currently. I hope that you can fix it quickly and would really suggest that 2.0 come with that fix. Thanks overall for all you are doing.
@kcase Thanks for sharing your OF workflow. It’s kind of inspiring - I don’t usually learn as many keyboard shortcuts as I should, beyond the universal ones that were ingrained in me in High School. Maybe I should make a Q2 resolution to touch the mouse less, (although working on a laptop means the touchpad is always very close at hand). Unfortunately, I hadn’t been converted to the Church of Mac yet back when OF1 was introduced, or if I had been, I hadn’t discovered OF yet.
Regarding your surprise at resistance to multiple windows, for me it’s a performance issue. I would like to replace my laptop soon - it’s nearly seven years old and should have been replaced 2-3 years ago - but I haven’t yet. Every additional program or window leads to a higher chance of the beach ball of death appearing for longer than I care to admit, so I rarely open multiple windows, and often work with OF closed, dropping messages to the OmniSync Dropbox if something pops into my head that needs to be recorded.
Add a 1440x900 screen, where working with 2 windows means I can’t really see what’s going on in either one, and multiple-window workflows are kind of dead for me.
Just downloaded the beta this weekend and played with it. Must say, impressed, but the fact that this feature from OF1 was missing really perplexed me. I dropped my inbox items into my projects (or made them project themselves) everyday in OF1. The Inbox seems sort of useless now - its just a list of things that I haven’t processed and have no easy way to process them. I most live in the Projects or context tabs now.
I suppose the two window solution will work for now. It just does not seem as elegant and efficient as I expect from Omnigroup. I look forward to an ultimate solution to this problem.
It seems to me that a simple “No Project” Project at the top of that Tab would make it easy to drag and drop items into projects. Then they would be automatically be removed from the Inbox based on the users settings in preferences. That would also be consistent wit the project tab (keeping projects in the Tab and not the entire Inbox) and would be consistent with the way you handle contexts (with the “No Context” list). Just my two cents, but I do agree that this is a critical feature fem OF1 that is now missing in OF2.
Thank you for keeping us informed about this Ken, It is good to know that you and your team are on the issue.
One item that should be mentioned regarding multiple windows: it doesn’t work with full screen, which I’ve found myself using more often now that the inspector is embedded in the window.
Hi,
Is it just me, or is the Inbox independent of almost every perspective or view aside from “Inbox”, especially the “Review”? This seems like a huge over site, especially when it comes to the review! If there was an option to add it to the view a la the folder option, it would be fantastic (I saw a Photoshop mock up elsewhere in the forums).
Already sent the feature request by email, but thought others might have some info on the subject (which is why I posted here too).
The inbox used to be in the review perspective in OF1. Since the new review is project focused I can see why it’s missing, but it does mean I need to add a manual “Check inbox” step to my weekly review.
Let me add my “+1” to simply showing the Inbox as a separate quasi-project pinned to the top of the Projects list (in the Projects tab), similar to the standard view in OF1. Of course you’re right that inbox items aren’t projects, but I think it makes perfect sense to view the Inbox itself as a special sort of project. Ken, do you have data indicating that OF1 users found this confusing? If not, well, it wasn’t broken so don’t fix it.
Just wondering — several people have suggest a “No Project” item at the top of the projects list. The only tasks I have without a project are inbox items. In fact, just to check, I just switched to the context tab and created a new task with no project in one of my contexts, and guess where it landed? That’s right, in the Inbox. (I can’t create a new task in the “No Context” section at all.) So is it even possible to have tasks with no project anywhere other than the Inbox? If not, then there’d really be no difference between this No Project item and the Inbox itself.
If you have a task that has been assigned a context, but no project, it would not be in the Inbox (depending on your inbox settings), but also not have a project. I have OF remove items from the Inbox if they have EITHER a project OR context assigned (setting is in preferences), so if either is triggered, not in Inbox. I do this most often for quick things like running an errand. I have a context for @errands and just drop a new item in there through my phone on the way out or something. No need to assign a project to it.
That is just the way I works. Obviously, others could be different. The point is that it is possible, and even likely, to have items that are not in the Inbox that are not assigned a project.
OK. I just figured out that OF will automatically (it appears) create a “Miscellaneous” project for anything task with a context, but no project, that is NOT in the Inbox (because my settings are to remove anything with either a context or project from the Inbox). So I just renamed the “Miscellaneous” project to “No Project” and wallaa! Instant “No Project” Project.
I will try it out for a few days and see if it stays this way.
