The Omni Group has published its latest road map. As a fan of their software, I love reading these. They are committing to release OmniFocus 4 this year and they are also working on an update to OmniGraffle. I’ve heard from a lot of folks about the OmniFocus 4 release, and I’ve got a few thoughts:

• Many readers tried the early betas and didn’t care for it. If that’s you, I’d encourage you to give the current, later betas, another look. A year ago, they were focused on features. They’ve done a ton of UI polish since then.
• The Omni Group is the first company I’ve seen emerge from the morass of Swift UI with a high-end productivity app. I expect this will pay dividends going forward. Just like we’re now seeing Apple release major new features across all platforms at once, I expect we’ll see the same from the Omni Group.

I went into the wild over the last six months looking seriously at other task manager options including Reminders, Things, and some of the emerging online tools. I started that survey willing to move to another app, but ended up right back where I started. My takeaway is that OmniFocus is still the only option for me. (Perspectives are so powerful and you can link anything, anywhere.) While Reminders is a lot better, on a scale of 1 to 10 it goes to 7, whereas OmniFocus goes to 11.

Finally, now that I’ve finished my survey, I’ve committed three months to making an entirely new edition of the OmniFocus Field Guide once the new version ships.

A few months ago, I did an extended Friends of Dave interview with Sal Soghoian about the new voice commands for OmniFocus. This has been in the MacSparky Labs for a few months, and several members have been using this cool feature. This is one of those things I wanted to make sure everyone can see, so here it is.

I put a lot of content like this in the MacSparky Labs. I’d love to have you join.

Links from Video

Omni Automation Plug-Ins for OmniFocus

Installing Plug-Ins

Script Security

Omni Automation

Omni Automation in OmniFocus

Omni Automation Controls in OmniFocus

The OmniFocus team has been hard at work on OmniFocus 4 for some time now. Recently they announced the public release of the Beta for OmniFocus 4 for Mac. There are several significant improvements coming with OmniFocus 4:

Feature Parity

With OmniFocus now built around SwiftUI, Mac, iPhone, and iPad features are essentially in sync. Generally, you get all features everywhere. For example, you can now get location-based tags on the Mac for the first time.

New Design

The new design is lighter than previous iterations of OmniFocus. There’s more white space, and the UI is much cleaner. Nevertheless, it still feels like a flavor of OmniFocus. 

You can read more details and sign up for the beta here.