OmniFocus 2 for iPhone
OmniFocus 2 for iPhone was truly developed from scratch for iOS 7. First, we put together a home screen that was capable of showing a bit more than before. We all love Forecast — in OmniFocus 2, you’ll get a peek at your week on page one. With iOS 7’s tint colors, each badge and each view of the app has a specific feel. And if you need to go all the way to the Home screen, tap-and-hold the back button to get there.
The background refresh is what I’ll probably like the most. Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet work with TextExpander on iOS 7.
The new start up screen puts everything you need on one iOS 7-friendly screen. Forecast is across the top of the screen along with a live count of due items for each of the next seven days. There are also large buttons on the home screen for the Inbox (including an inbox count), Flagged items (also with a count), Projects, Nearby, and Contexts. Finally there is a list of perspectives at the bottom of the screen. Like before, you can star individual perspectives and they will show up on this screen and you can access all perspectives by tapping on the Perspectives button.
More interestingly, the Omni Group really got back to basics. They obviously spent some time retooling the most basic of features to make the entire experience more usable. Take the task detail view as an example – the notes section for a task is no longer hidden behind an obscure blue arrow. Notes and even Attachments now have their own dedicated tabs in the task detail view and no longer feel like a UI afterthought. Furthermore, attachments are no longer line items in a table-view, but instead have been replaced with a collection view as shown below. As more attachments are added, additional equal sized squares are added to the collection.
Update (2014-08-01): OmniFocus 2.2 (released July 15) adds back support for TextExpander touch.
2 Comments RSS · Twitter
I wouldn't call OmniFocus 2 a disaster, but I don't see how anyone can think it's UI is very good. Yes, it is pleasing to look at, it is certainly embracing iOS 7 with a smile, but aside from that I see a bunch of missed opportunities for better interaction design starting with the Forecast section which delivers you to "Today" instead of the day that was actually tapped. What's the point of an uncluttered minimalist display if the actual elements on the display don't actually do the drop dead obvious things they seem to have been built to do?
[…] and I use it in a similar way, only with OmniFocus instead of Drafts. I started using it when OmniFocus 2 for iPhone initially did not support TextExpander touch. It does now, but I found that I prefer Launch Center […]
