Wednesday, September 26, 2018

OmniFocus 3 for Mac

Brent Simmons:

This release brings a modern design that still manages to feel familiar — OmniFocus 2 users will feel right at home, while still being delighted by the fresh new user interface. It also brings new features and improves existing features.

[…]

  • Tags add a powerful additional organizing tool. Create tags for people, energy levels, priorities, locations, and more.
  • The Forecast view shows your tasks and calendar events in order, so you can better see what’s coming up in your day.
  • Enhanced repeating tasks are easier than ever to set up — and they work with real-world examples such as the first weekday of the month.
  • The updated, modern design helps you focus on your projects and actions.

A solid update to one of my most important apps. My favorite new feature is being able to reorder actions from the Tags view. They’ve also brought back the 1.x feature of being able to drag and drop onto tags within the main part of the window. I was initially concerned about tags replacing contexts because I thought this might make things cumbersome given that I usually only want one tag, but the implementation seems to be really well done.

I like the updated design in general, but the inspector has lower information density than before. I suppose the idea was to follow Apple’s lead with iWork’s iOS-inspired sidebars, which I also found to be a regression. Whereas I used to be able to quickly glance at the inspector to, e.g., check a date, I can no longer do that without scrolling. In theory, I should be able to collapse some of the sections to more easily see the areas I care about. However, each section contains something that I do want to see, so there’s no way to hide just the parts that I rarely care about (status and duration) or to use a smaller font or a less padded layout.

Brent Simmons:

Your old archive isn’t copied to OmniFocus 3 as part of the first run — but the first time you use the Archive feature in OmniFocus 3, the app will prompt you to copy it over.

Ken Case:

When OmniFocus 3 for Mac becomes available for sale (on Monday, September 24), you’ll be able to get a 50% discount on the upgrade so long as you download the new version from the same source as your earlier version.

The Mac App Store doesn’t support paid upgrades, so this is implemented as a separate SKU that offers you a discounted In-App Purchase if you had purchased the previous version. The direct sale version also has the new bundle identifier, and as a result it doesn’t retain your preferences from OmniFocus 2.

See also:

Previously: OmniFocus 3 for iOS, OmniFocus 2018 Roadmap.

Update (2018-09-27): See also: David Sparks and Allen Pike.

3 Comments RSS · Twitter

[…] I updated to OmniFocus 3, its service was renamed from OmniFocus 2: Send to Inbox to OmniFocus 3: Send to Inbox, but the […]

When apple said they were bringing major Mac app developers back to the App Store, I thought they would allow for common paid upgrade options. At least allow a select group of developers to do that.

But no.

Shame that they make their normal version worse to accommodate the app store. ;( Failing to migrate preferences is a horrible UI. ;(

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