OmniFocus 2018 Roadmap
The ability to apply tags without replacing existing tags opens up all sorts of possibilities. You can have a set of tags representing locations (#home, #work, #grocery-store), and an orthogonal set of tags representing things you might want to tackle based on difficulty or energy level (#tough, #easy, #routine). You can track priority (#urgent, #important) or people (#tim, #molly), or even use tags to track a list of things to do #today. Tags are incredibly flexible, letting you organize things in whatever ways make the most sense to you.
Fortunately, it sounds like they are not replacing contexts.
OmniFocus 3 solves this issue by letting each tag track its own independent ordering of tasks. If I’m planning a run to the grocery store, I can look at my #grocerystore tag and drag those items into whatever order I prefer, without changing the order of those tasks in the project list or in other tags. And if I’ve tagged a bunch of tasks to do #today, I can reorder those tasks in whatever way makes the most sense to me.
[…]
For OmniFocus 3, we’re adding support for linking tasks between unrelated databases. The idea is that I can send you a task (with its notes and attachments and due date) and propose that our tasks be linked, and you can choose whether to accept the link or not. While our tasks are linked, we can each see updates to the status of that specific task. But in each of our databases, that task can live wherever we want: so I can turn my task into its own project with a number of subtasks, while you might have that task as one step in a sequential project.
[…]
OmniFocus for the Web will not be offered as a standalone service: it will only be able to sync with existing databases set up by the OmniFocus app. Since this is another version of the app that we’ll be maintaining as a constantly available online service, we’ll be charging a subscription fee for access.
Update (2018-01-29): Ken Case:
We won’t have anything we call “contexts” anymore, but v3’s tags will have all the same capabilities v2’s contexts had: locations, hierarchy, and status. But they’ll be getting some new (optional) capabilities as well. (With a more familiar name.)
Update (2018-02-01): See also: The Omni Show.
4 Comments RSS · Twitter
Doesn't the section heading ("Goodbye, contexts. Hello, tags!") imply that tags will replace contexts?
@Lawrence I guess so. I was going by the statement that tags are optional, and the fact that the examples use # for tags, which implies that @ is still for contexts.
I like the sound of those collaboration features, though I'm not sure how that will work if you're hosting your own sync via webdav.
