I recently had the privilege of spending a week at the Lynda.com studios recording screencasts about OmniFocus. It was a lot of fun and now the courses are available for viewing and download to Lynda member. There are two courses:
OmniFocus for Mac Essential Training
OmniFocus for iOS Essential Training
If you are a Lynda subscriber (or know a Lynda subscriber) please watch the screencasts and spread the word. I’m quite proud of them.
This week MacSparky is sponsored by OmniFocus. The gang at the Omni Group has been hard at work at work and recently released an update that adds custom columns. This new feature gives you tons of control over what you see in your perspectives. You can learn more about custom columns from the Omni Group directly. Adding this feature wasn’t easy and the Omni Group developers explain how they pulled it off right here.
I like custom columns so much that I made this short screencast. Enjoy.
If you’re a subscriber of Tim Stringer’s Learn OmniFocus website, you may want to join me tomorrow as I do a live webinar about OmniFocus workflows and strategy.
I’d like to thank the OmniGroup for sponsoring MacSparky this week. The OmniFocus team has been hard at work, releasing version 2.6 this week. The new version includes some nice new features, including dark mode, swipe to flag, and push syncing. The new version is great. Don’t believe me? Take a minute and a half to watch the below video and you will. Learn more at the Omni Group.
One nice benefit of no longer working for the man is that I have a lot more control over my schedule. It has been a surprise to me that I find myself often working late into the night. In my former life, I had always been an early riser but in this new iteration of me, it sometimes makes more sense to do my work later in the day.
One consequence of this is that every day at midnight my OmniFocus database fills up with tasks previously set for the next day. I don’t want to see all those tasks. If I’m looking at OmniFocus at midnight it’s because I’m still working on stuff from the prior day. Fortunately, OmniFocus has a setting for that on the Mac app in the preferences pane.
Interestingly, there is no similar setting on the iPhone and iPad but if you change a setting on the Mac, when you synchronize the database the iPhone and iPad will also start setting start times consistent with the new Mac default.
On a recent episode of Mac Power Users, I talked about my workflow that uses IFTTT to send articles from Pocket to OmniFocus based on tags. A lot of people have asked me to explain further. Here is how you do it.
I wanted a way to tag an article in Pocket and have something specific happen in OmniFocus. The below example takes any article tagged “post” and creates an OmniFocus task titled, “Write Post about” and inserts the URL name. I use this all the time.
As seen with the below screenshot, this recipe grabs Pocket articles tagged “post” and then processes them through my Gmail account. Gmail is required here because you’ll need to customize the message in a way that only Google can in IFTTT. For this step you’ll need a Pocket and Gmail account and have their channels connected to your IFTTT account.
This step looks for a specific tag in Pocket. Because you can use multiple tags in Pocket, you could duplicate this recipe and have it perform different actions on different tags.
The Omni Group has this great feature call OmniFocus Mail Drop. You can send an email to a secret link and it adds the email to your OmniFocus inbox. You do have use the OmniSync service but the ability to create tasks via email is really handy.
This step is just sending an email to that super-secret mail drop location. You’d have to substitute your own mail drop email address.
Next I set a custom subject line, “Write post about ” *Title*. This inserts the article title so, as sent, it may say, “Write post about hemp Apple Watch bands.” OmniFocus will take that subject line and make it the task name. This is why I use the Gmail account for this recipe.
Next I have IFTTT send through further details to the email body. This gets added to the note in the task. This recipe isn’t particularly difficult to create or earth shattering. In some ways, it may be outdated by iOS 8 and Pocket’s ability to add tasks to OmniFocus right inside the app. That lets you avoid pushing items through the Internet pipes. However, I’d argue that there is no way faster for me to create these tasks than simply tagging an article “post” and moving on.
I’m pleased to announce the release of the OmniFocus Video Field Guide. This is a screencast, not a book. A lot of people have asked me to write a book about OmniFocus but instead I made this 2.5 hour video that takes you, soup to nuts, through the Omni Group’s supremely bad-ass task manager. The screencast can turn an absolute OmniFocus novice into a task-managing ninja.
The screencast is fully bookmarked, nearly two and a half hours, and full of awesome. I’ve been working on this screencast for months now and I’m quite proud of it. You can learn more and buy it for $10 from here. Below is a sample video.
In addition to the release of iOS 8 today (and a LOT of app updates), the Omni Group has released OmniFocus for iPad, version 2. I’ve been using the beta for awhile and have some thoughts about the update.
OmniFocus 2 for the iPad is very similar to that of OmniFocus 2 on the iPhone. It has that sparse iOS 7 look sprinkled with the Omni Group’s own particular aesthetic. It is not just a coat of paint though. Controls have been moved and working in the application is more fluid than with version 1. The Omni Group has years of experience with the iPad now and it shows. As an example, I can now look at my forecast for three days from now with one tap. This tap efficiency appears everywhere in the new application. Another example is the project review view. OmniFocus on the iPad has always excelled as for project review but the new version has a ground-up redesign that lets me review projects faster than before.
In both portrait and landscape mode, the left pane displays buttons to access perspectives and the forecasts. (With the pro version, explained below, you can add your custom perspectives and also re-arrange their display order. In portrait view, when you select a perspective, the left pane slides out of you and dedicates the entire screen to the selected view.
Pulling down on this perspective sidebar, exposes the synchronization and settings buttons. Synchronize button forces the synchronization with your syncing mechanism of choice, which can include a private server or OmniFocus`s own OmniPresence service.
The Settings include options for due dates, notifications, and the synchronization methodology. There’s also the ability to enable TextExpander snippets which can be really handy when creating new tasks and OmniFocus.
One problem I’ve always had with the iPad and iPhone versions of OmniFocus is the ability to easily move the defer date of a project. The way I organize my task projects, sometimes I will hit one that has multiple associated tasks on a day when I have no time to deal with it. Indeed, I may conclude that I don’t have any time to deal with it until a week from next Tuesday. With the prior version I then had to go drill down in the Projects perspective and adjust the project defer date there or tediously move the start date on every associated task. Neither of these options was very palatable and quite often I ended up doing this on the Mac instead.
With the new OmniFocus 2 for iPad, I can now adjust a project defer date right in the standard view. When viewing a project in a perspective that will display the project name (this is entirely up to the user and customizable), you can tap on the project and the task list and make adjustments to its defer date right there.
If on Monday morning you wake up to find you have a 20 item project that you simply are not going to get to, you can move it to some future date with just a few taps on the iPad. This simplified interface makes those large review sessions possible on the iPad now where they were not before.
The Omni Group didn’t waste any time getting in on iOS 8 extensions. The Today View widget display tasks with upcoming due dates. You can check the task off right in the Today view without even opening OmniFocus.
They also have an extension that lets me save a webpage right to the OmniFocus inbox. You can also add project and context information at the time of capture. I can’t tell you the number of times I’ve emailed web pages off in the past for purpose of capturing into OmniFocus. This is much more efficient.
Search out tasks was alway a bit of a mystery in OmniFocus. With the new version, it is much easier with a tap-able button to search the current perspective, remaining tasks, or the whole enchilada.
One feature that doesn’t get much attention is the synchronization engine. My database has a lot of projects and tasks in it and I’m jumping between devices all day long. OmniFocus has got so adept at synchronizing this data that I find myself taking it for granted. Nevertheless, I know the OmniGroup is always working on finding ways to speed it up, including building their own data storage and synchronization mechanism with OmniPresence.
The new version of OmniFocus for the iPad adds background syncing, which allows the application to update its data in the background. This is all subject to the magic sauce of iOS to determine which applications are worthy of getting these background processes. With the amount of time I spent in OmniFocus, I find that it does a pretty good job of keeping my task list up-to-date in The background and allowing me to spend even less time pushing the synchronize button when I want to be getting my tasks done.
The application is priced with an entry-level price of $29.99 and an in-app purchase of $19.99 for the pro version. If you have the prior version of OmniFocus for iPad installed on your iPad, the new version will sense that and give you the pro upgrade for free. This is about as close to upgrade pricing as I’ve ever seen on iOS. I hope Apple allows this to continue and other application developers follow suit.
The pro version unlocks several new features not seen and prior versions of OmniFocus on the iPad. Chief among those is the ability to edit perspectives. One of the most common questions I received about OmniFocus is from users that don’t have a portable Mac and want the ability to get by with OmniFocus just on the iPad and iPhone. I’ve always written back that the big stumbling block is perspectives. Perspectives give OmniFocus the power to become whatever you need it to become. User-defined perspectives (like mine) allow you to make this task system work for you, no matter how your brain is wired. Previously, you can only set of those custom perspectives on a Mac. (They would previously synchronize to an iPad but you could not edit them on an iPad.)
With the upgraded pro version you can now edit perspectives on your iPad to your heart’s content. As seen in the attached screenshot, you have a lot of parameters you can set in his custom perspectives ranging from a custom icon to searching for particular text. Perspectives you create on the iPad will sync over to your Mac and iPhone without difficulty. In a sense, this new feature liberates OmniFocus from the Mac and I think people who want to try and get by with just an iOS installation, have a real fighting chance now where they simply did not before.
The first version of OmniFocus for the iPad was truly revolutionary. It gave me the power to manage my tasks on my iPad in a way that I didn’t think was possible. Building on the shoulders of its predecessor, this version doesn’t seek to reinvent the wheel, but instead make the wheel spin a lot faster and more efficiently. In that regard, OmniFocus 2 for the iPad absolutely delivers. Working through my admittedly complicated life with this application happens faster now and, frankly, the redesign makes the process more delightful. I have personal knowledge of exactly how hard the team at The Omni Group worked on this new version and I’m loving it. I bought the app as soon as it appeared in the App Store earlier today. You can learn more at the OmniGroup website and from their OmniFocus 2 for iPad iBook.
Federico Viticci and Silvia Gatta just released a new set of OmniFocus icons last week at Icons & Coffee. There are some great icons in there that you’ll probably find use for. Some of the icons have even got me thinking about setting up perspectives to match. If I could just talk Federico and Silvia into adding a nice MacSparky lightning bolt … The icons are great and if you are as obsessive about OmniFocus (like me) having your perspective icons just right is worth it. The icons are on sale for $9.99 but will go up to $14.99 shortly.
Max Masnick is using Text Expander to quickly enter defer and due dates in OmniFocus. Max primarily uses this for events that have the same defer and due dates. For example if you want a task to disappear but show up as due on Monday at 9am. I don’t have much cause for that style task because I so rarely use due dates but there is no reason you couldn’t also use this to defer with later relative due dates, for example two weeks from Friday, which in OmniFocus speak would be 2w Fri. Moreover, Max figured out how to combine defer dates and TextExpander so of course he gets a link.
