OmniFocus 4.9
OmniFocus 4.9 adds support for Siri AI, optional new date parsing assistance via Apple Intelligence, and a range of new and updated App Intents exposed as Shortcuts actions.
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In our testing we’ve found that the new Siri AI hasn’t yet learned how to work with app capabilities that it hasn’t specifically been trained on, even for App Intents that are available in Shortcuts and Spotlight. For example, its understanding of how to work with OmniFocus is based on how it’s been trained to work with the Reminders app. Our work in OmniFocus 4.9 means that Siri now knows about “reminders” in OmniFocus (i.e. actions and Inbox items), “lists” (i.e. projects) which contain reminders, and any “groups” (i.e. folders) that lists have been organized into. Siri can assign and edit reminder due dates, flags, repeat schedules, and notes and image attachments in OmniFocus. This is another great leap forward! But as soon as you try to go beyond what Reminders can do, you find its limits: for example, it doesn’t understand the distinction between due dates, planned dates, and defer dates.
Siri also doesn’t really understand much about how our document-based apps work, because Apple hasn’t trained it on our specific apps or anything equivalent. So, Siri doesn’t know how to make an outline, or a diagram, or a Gantt chart. We expect this to improve over time—after all, we’ve worked with other language models that do understand how to make those things—but it’s important to understand Siri’s current limits.
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With Siri AI, Spotlight becomes even more important as a source for personal context. You can ask Siri about content in your OmniFocus database, so Siri can summarize the actions you’ve completed this week, or tell you what items you might consider working on soon.
My favorite change in OmniFocus 4.9 seems less exiting, but I’m irrationally happy about it. Last year, as part of the Liquid Glass update, they redesigned the Perspectives Bar on iOS to automatically collapse and expand as you scroll. I found the animations distracting, it messed up my muscle memory, and it required lots of extra taps. In 4.9, there’s a new Show Perspective Bar option, which you can set to Automatically (the 4.8 behavior), Manually (stay collapsed but expand when you tap), or Always (show the expanded state all the time, nothing moves). This is, of course, what I chose.
I’m still seeing the previously mentioned glitches in the Mac app with tabbing, spontaneous tag collapsing, and the window moving itself between spaces. The iOS app sometimes still shows an out-of-date list of flagged actions.
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For what it’s worth, windows moving on their own between spaces, combined with some applications occasionally and randomly hiding after Exposè and all Spaces preview at the top showing only some of the open windows, are the only serious bugs I’m seeing daily in Golden Gate and they do not only affect OmniFocus, but all apps including Finder. Makes using my 5 Spaces setup an interesting experience!
@Cesare Sounds like a different issue. I’ve been seeing the OmniFocus windows move on Sequoia and Tahoe and am not yet running Golden Gate on my OmniFocus Mac.
@Cesare For me, it happens when a background sync is triggered. It closes the window for a while, and then if I’ve manually changed spaces during that time, when it reopens the window it will then be on the current space.
@Michael From my perspective (no OmniFocus pun intended) the oddest part from what you described is the window closing occasionally when it syncs in background: that part never happens to me. It kind of makes sense that, if it closes, than when it respawns it's in the current space, but it's certainly something I'd reach out to the usually very helpful Omni support people (you probably already had).
@Cesare Yes, I agree that the closing is the odd part. I’m guessing it’s tied to sync integrating changes from another device, but I don’t know how to reproduce it. I first reported this to Omni in April of 2025, and they’ve certainly tried to figure it out but haven’t been fully successful yet. For a while, last summer, it seemed to be totally fixed, then it came back as bad as ever. Late last year (I think, I forget which update) they made some changes, and now it happens a few times a week instead of multiple times per day. These are under counts because if the window closes while I’m away from my Mac or working on the same space that has OmniFocus I might not notice.
@Michael Memory is an odd thing, your last message unlocked something in my brain... I had something similar in 2023, though at the time I described the phenomenon as the window "hiding" to Omni people, here's what I wrote to them:
> I’m experiencing a slight annoyance because, throughout the day, OmniFocus’ window hides “by itself”. Here’s what I mean with “hides":
>
> - Sometimes Focus’ window hides while it’s not being interacted with (maybe it’s a consequence of sync? can’t prove this hunch though, as it doesn’t happen every time, maybe 4 or 5 times in a workday): the window is just sitting there inactive in my Desktop, and at some point it hides (closes? the Focus Dock icon is not greyed out like it happens when you manually hide an app). Clinking the Dock icon in this case makes the window re-appear (re-open?).
>
> - The app hides every time an Omni Automation is run on a task; again, clicking the Dock icon makes it re-appear.
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> - If in Mail I use OmniFocus’ Quick Entry via a keyboard shortcut to create a task with the selected email linked in the notes of the task, as soon as I hit Save in the Quick Entry panel, Omnifocus hides; this happens every time Mail has remained active, but does not happen if OmniFocus has been activated after invoking the Quick Entry panel from Mail. Only in this scenario, clicking the Dock icon does not make the window re-appear, and I need to quit and relaunch Focus.
At the time, Shane from Omni replied:
> I was able to reproduce the problem with a similar plug-in, and when clicking away to another window while there was an in progress edit to a note (or title), and I’ve logged both of those problems in our database.
And sooner after that an update fixed the issue for good for me.
So I might be wasting your time, but I'd look at two things: if you're adding tasks with quick entry and if you have some Omni automations that can be temporarily disabled without causing too much disruption to your workflow, to see if with those off the window behavior stops.
Hope this helps and that it's not totally unrelated! Good luck!
@Cesare That’s interesting, thanks. I’m not using Omni Automation. I often use Quick Entry, but that’s never when the problem occurs. It’s always after I’ve not been interacting with the Mac version for a while, but maybe I did add an action on my phone.
