OmniFocus 2 (Mac App Store) is now available. In general, I am finding it to be well designed. The menus and options are refined and simplified. It’s a bit less flexible than previous versions, but I think it’s more approachable.
The beta’s problems with low information density remain, though you can somewhat mitigate them by clicking this link to enable the experimental “compact” layout. Even with the single line layout, the window makes less efficient use of space. For example, in OmniFocus 1 there were 219 pixels from the left edge of the window to left edge of my actions. In OmniFocus 2, with the narrowest possible sidebar, it’s 387 pixels. The minimum font size is also larger, so the actions themselves show less text in the same width.
The text itself is now set in ApproximaNova, rather than a font of my choosing. So there’s no way to get high-quality unsmoothed text like I could with Osaka. With font smoothing, the text looks fuzzy on a non-Retina display. They gray note text is especially hard to read.
You can use OmniFocus 1 and 2 simultaneously, since they are sync-compatible. This is interesting for comparing the design, as well as the speed. Some actions, such as flipping views, are faster in 2. Arrow-keying through projects and contexts is much faster in 1. Moving actions up and down has always been slow and still is.
Many of the screenshots show OmniFocus in full screen mode. Indeed, it doesn’t seem to have been designed for small windows. If you have the sidebar or inspector hidden, showing them can grow the window off the right edge of the screen, and hiding them doesn’t always put things back the way they were.
I like the redesigned inspector, but the resizing problems could be avoided if it were available as a popover or floating window. Like the iPhone version, there are now buttons to quickly defer a task for a day, week, or month. I prefer to use a script bound to a keyboard shortcut.
The manual—which is well done—is now available on iBooks. Unfortunately, the Mac version of iBooks doesn’t support scroll wheels and has a distracting animation when paging via the keyboard. The app has a built-in HTML-based help viewer that works better, except that it isn’t searchable. A PDF, with page thumbnails and easy searching, would probably be best.
The app seems to be pretty solid for a new release. The main bugs that I noticed are:
- The “Go to Search Field” menu item and keyboard shortcut don’t always work.
- Services no longer work in the outline when whole actions are selected (just text). I’ve posted a script that works around this so that you can still bulk-open URLs.
- The Control-D binding for Forward Delete no longer works at all in the outline. I’ve long used that to delete actions so that I can keep my right hand on the mouse.
- You can no longer drag and drop actions onto contexts in the outline.
Design Font Smoothing iBooks Mac Mac App OmniFocus
Debug 36:
Debug is a casual, conversational interview show with the best developers in the business about the amazing apps they make and why and how they make them. On this episode Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software talks to Guy and Rene about the journey of BBEdit from the classic Mac OS to OS X, PowerPC to Intel, 32- to 64-bit, and the direct sales to the Mac App Store.
BBEdit Business Carbon History Mac Mac App Mailsmith
Arq recently reported hundreds of GB of missing files, across multiple backup targets. This is so at odds with Amazon Glacier’s reputed 11-nines durability that I’m guessing it’s due to an application bug. It would not surprise me if the files are still there; Arq just isn’t seeing them. In any event, my strategy is to have multiple cloud backups—Arq and CrashPlan (which has been working very well recently)—so this got me thinking about possibly adding a third.
The obvious choice is Backblaze. It has a native Mac app, is developed by ex-Apple engineers, and sponsors many fine podcasts.
I’d previously been hesitant about Backblaze because of the way it handles external drives. I’ve read about problems with large bzfileids.dat files sucking RAM and preventing backups entirely once they get too large. It’s also worrisome that it only retains deleted files for 30 days—meaning that a file is truly lost if I don’t notice that it’s missing right away. And if, for some reason, my Mac doesn’t back up for 6 months, Backblaze will expunge all my data, even if my subscription is still paid-up. The situations in which my Mac is not able to back up for a while are exactly the ones in which I (or my survivors) would want to be able to depend on a cloud backup!
My other concern is that Backblaze doesn’t actually back up everything. It fails all but one of the Backup Bouncer tests, discarding file permissions, symlinks, Finder flags and locks, creation dates (despite claims), modification date (timezone-shifted), extended attributes (which include Finder tags and the “where from” URL), and Finder comments. Arq, CrashPlan (as of version 3), SuperDuper, and Time Machine all support all of these. Dropbox supports all of them except creation dates, locks, and symlinks.
As a programmer, I especially care about metadata. But I think most users would as well, if they knew to think about it. For example, losing dates can make it harder to find your files (i.e. they disappear from smart folders or sort incorrectly), even leading to errors (i.e. not finding the correct set of invoices for a time period). You would never use a backup app that didn’t remember which folders your files were in, so I don’t know why people consider it acceptable to lose their Finder tags. (If you use EagleFiler, it can restore the tags for you.)
Some people don’t care much about metadata. Macworld’s survey of online backup services didn’t mention it. Neither did Walt Mossberg. (He also told readers that Backblaze automatically includes “every user-created file”; in fact, it skips files over 4 GB by default.) [Update (2014-05-25): The Sweet Setup doesn’t mention metadata, either (via Nick Heer).]
Backblaze has a stock answer when asked about Backup Bouncer:
This actually tests disk imaging products, a bad test for backup as items we fail on shouldn’t be backed up by data backup service.
Some people accept this explanation. I think it’s misguided and borderline nonsensical. True, Backup Bouncer tests some rather esoteric features, but Backblaze fails the basic tests, too. It would be one thing to say that there’s a limitation whereby dates, tags, comments, etc. aren’t backed up, but they’re actually saying that these shouldn’t be backed up. As if products that do back them up are in error. So presumably Backblaze doesn’t consider this a bug and won’t be fixing it.
Lastly, it’s a shame that Backblaze isn’t up front about what metadata it supports. Some users are technical enough to investigate these things themselves. Others will have read the excellent Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac and seen its appendixes, which give Backblaze a C for metadata support. But most Backblaze users won’t know that a poor choice has been made for them until they need to restore from their backup.
Amazon Glacier Arq Backblaze Backup Cloud CrashPlan Mac Mac App Metadata SuperDuper
