Leave a Review OmniFocus 4
Excellent update
I have been using OmniFocus for years, and I’m totally dependent on it for organizing my work.
OmniFocus 4 is mainly an update of the user interface, and it is an excellent one, in particular for iPad. Before the iPad interface was so clunky that I would always to go my Mac to do anything. Now the Mac and iPad interfaces are nearly identical, and yet it works as native apps on each platform. Not an easy thing to do, even for Apple’s own apps.
This is a worthy update from OmniFocus 3.Show lessPalmIPhoneConvert
Will wait for it to be great
I have used OF to manage my life since version 2, and there is little else that works as well for me. The OmniGroup team has earned my respect and I do not want this to be a complaining review; I understand the future-proofing that needs to happen here and I see the foundations of that in OF 4.
That said, I caved and moved back to OF 3. The stability of this piece of software it’s important to me, and I’m not in a position to beta test Omnifocus, so I will come back to 4 when it is more stable and reliable.
In OF 4 when I check something off, sometimes another list item is checked off instead. I don’t notice this, and then miss tasks let people down. Another example is changing due dates on tasks; OF 4 likes to ignore the date I’ve chosen and save the previous one.
In summary, OmniGroup does good work and I’m sure that OF 4 will soon have these critical issues worked out, but I can’t use it until that’s done.
Thanks and looking forward to checking in again!
(September 2024)Show lessTeejmya
Potentially Viable
It has the planning hierarchies and matrices you’ve come to expect from Omni, but the programming is clunky and lacks sufficient UX direction. For example, adding a task/action flows downward, which makes sense for cascading lists that toggle. The experience gets confused when adding sub-tasks. It flows downward to start, but if your cursor was previously on the dominant task, each new sub task will push any previously created sub-tasks down in the queue, which will force you to reorganize everything manually if you were expecting a standard hierarchical list. If your cursor was on the previously created sub-task, the next created sub-task will be placed above the previous sub-task. When you finish engaging with the sub-task and move on, your list of subtasks often get re-arranged seemingly randomly.
Another problem is the varying representation of folders. I embrace the enjoyment of customization, but not at the expense of function. Nesting folders holds an importance when dealing with tiered, multi-variable projects. Leaving folders out of views leaves the pathway inarticulate, which muddies a user pathway, especially when sufficient complexity is achieved.
This application has the information visualization components in place, but without effective user interaction to help impart the value of using it, there isn’t much function—despite the potential value of the depth it could provide.Show lessWrigglingOstrichEgg