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It's the classic "Adobe" issue: Never remove, only add.Adding tasks in OmniFocus for iPhone is extremely simple, and the new task button is on the menubar in every screen. This means any significant changes that Omni makes risk alienating those users – who trust and demand the most from these tools. And when you consider that many of their products are pro-grade, best-of-class examples in each of their categories, you end up with not just passionate users, but demanding ones. OmniFocus is a personal task manager by the Omni Group for macOS and iOS.Omni's focus on products and platforms for which they clearly have a passion in turn engenders a lot of the same passion and love from their userbase. OmniGraffle.No Web App Heres how to use the AE workflow with OmniFocus 3: Set up the tags. Near-instant push sync across all platforms: Mac, iOS, and web.
As an OmniFocus fan for nearly a decade I can sympathize with the strong opinions that grow out of being a heavy user of something. Version 4 will follow in the footsteps of OmniPlan version 4, sporting a new simplified interface and more. Originally designed around the Getting Things Done methodology, and now on its third major version, OmniFocus has grown to be one of the most feature-rich task managers on any platform – far surpassing the common, but inadequate title of a to-do list.OmniGroup has announced a public betq for the latest macOS and iOS versions of OmniFocus. You can give the tasks a context and project or just let them sync to your computer and organize them later.Perhaps Omni's most popular product is OmniFocus – a rich suite of task manager applications for macOS, iOS, iPadOS and web.
This is, of course, nonsense.But occasionally trends appear in the cacophonous feature request threads on Omni's Forums. And you feel that somehow you understand the tool better than other people, including the developers themselves. You start to have ideas for new features – features that would, of course, suit you.
I want to narrow that gap.Employ best practices from Apple's Human Interface Guidelines for each platform, while maintaining consistency and keeping the Omni brand in mind. Currently there is a significant gap between the user experience on iPhone and iPad when compared to Mac. The answer, it turns out, is not so simple.Design a consistent UX that scales from iOS, to iPadOS, to macOS. So I wanted to see what it might take to re-imagine the OmniFocus suite of apps. As popular competitors like Things win acclaim for their clean, modern appearance, OmniFocus – for all of its power – appears stuck in another time period. Whether it's multiple contexts (now tags), batch editing on iOS, floating time zone support ( likely thanks to CGP Grey), or collaborative tasks (soon? please?) – all of these started as user requests.But lately there has been a growing demand for the company to rethink the user experience and interface of OmniFocus.
I feel this is a double-edged sword. As mentioned above, The Omni Group has a track record of listening to its users and often implementing features, or providing options wherever possible. While my primary focus is not on features of the app, there are a few areas I wanted to contribute to.Create an opinionated design.
Omnifocus Iphone Mac OS X Retained A
The trends for iPadOS apps are starting to shift to adopting more Mac-like experiences.The early versions of Mac OS X retained a lot of design elements from NeXTSTEP one of those elements being inspector pallets. I think the current iPad app has the most potential for improvement – as it shares its user interface with the iPhone, rather than the Mac. My designs take the latter approach – but I recognize that's not necessarily going to be popular.Focus on the iPad. On the other hand, I think Omni is leaving some opportunities on the table to create strong stances on how the program ought to be used.
The result is a very narrow field filled many different types of controls. It stacks labels above controls, groups dissimilar datatypes, and behaves in a very different manner than its counterpart on iOS/iPadOS. It's especially challenging when those controls also need to be translated to iOS/iPadOS.OmniFocus' action inspector on macOS really shows its age. But putting that many controls in a small area is a really difficult task. Omni, like any good NeXTSTEP developer, has frequently leaned on inspectors as a core part of their UIs.and I think it works really well for the type of programs they make.
The Mac just offers much more flexibility than either the iPad or the iPhone. The Mac allows for more nuanced in-line editing of tasks.Try as one might, it's still difficult to justify creating feature parity between all of the platforms that OmniFocus runs on. I think this is still probably the right solution for those devices. If things are going to be grouped, wouldn't "Repeat" fit with "Dates"? Instead of acting as an organizational mechanism, these groupings seem to just act as a rough way of allowing them to be collapsed.On iPad and iPhone, entering new tasks summons a blank inspector. Or there's a collapsible section for "Dates", but a separate one for "Repeat". For example, under "Action" you can edit the Status, Project affiliation, and Flag (which is unlabeled – unless you hover for the tooltip).
While I did take some time to adjust this window's appearance, I was far more excited about how it could evolve by using natural language processing – similar to what can be found in other task managers, or apps like Fantastical. Summoning this window from anywhere within macOS is a crucial part of the idea capture process.
