OmniFocus 3.9.2 for mac是一款强大的任务管理软件,被誉于为“GTD王者”。 它拥有基础的提醒事项、日程管理等功能,覆盖 Mac、iPhone 和 iPad 三大平台,有着很好的体验。. If you have already purchased OmniFocus 2 Standard and would like to upgrade to OmniFocus 2 Pro, Omni Store customers can do so at a discount at any time by upgrading a license through our web store. Mac App Store customers can upgrade at any time within the OmniFocus 2 application by clicking Menu Bar OmniFocus In-App Purchase. OmniFocus 2's home screen. Everything in OmniFocus 2 is organized and simple to navigate. The home screen is a great way to see what you have coming up in a single glance.
Last week, I was one of the many who joined the OmniGroup as Ken Case, Liz Marley, Merlin Mann and David Sparks offered a preview of what’s to come with the upcoming version of my current task manager, OmniFocus 2.0.
Like any self-respecting OmniGeek, I cannot wait to get my hands on it and look forward to the reactions. Since my hands are not yet on it, here are few hands-off/eyes-on opinions…
The latest version brings four features:
- A new design that’s more in line with their popular iPad app.
- A new sidebar that incorporates the Inbox, Projects, Contexts, Forecasts, Flagged and Review.
- It brings the Forecast view and Review mode from the iPad to the Mac.
- It introduces a more affordable standard edition while still offering a pro version for geeks such as myself.
Menucar for uber rides 3 1. Let’s talk about them all…
The Design
As someone who has never tweaked the default design of the current version of OmniFocus (despite the fact that it leaves a lot to be desired here), I’m excited. Not only do I believe the application will be far friendlier to new users, but it will also be a welcome improvement for those who have been living in it, but lack the design skills to improve it on their own.
Shawn Blanc really nails why the improvement to the design of OmniFocus matters:
Never underestimate the power of good, delightful, UI design. In the case of OmniFocus, I think it’s crucial that the next version be as gorgeous and delightful as it is powerful and fearful.
[…]
[I]f it’s true that we use something more when we enjoy using it, then it’s also fair to say that a little bit of delight can go a long way in increasing usability.
Early indications seem to show that the OmniGroup is taking all the right steps to balance polish with power. I’m excited, even as a power user, for the delight and improved usability that I expect will come along with the improved design.
The Sidebar
I’m very excited about this (yes, I know it’s sad to be excited about a sidebar. But I am. So there!). A minor annoyance of mine has always been the inability to be in project mode while sorting by project. As you can see from an initial screenshot offered up by the OmniGroup, this is now possible in the latest version. In addition to my own selfish wants, I have a feeling that the new approach to the sidebar will make for a new, intuitive experience for new users while still working well for geeks such as myself.
The Forecast and Review
Considering the fact that I’ve never been a big user of the iPad version of OmniFocus (more a matter of my lack of iPad use than any issues with the app), I’m glad to see these two features make their way to the app that I spend most of my time in.
Forecast
The forecast mode offers a nice way to peek at your day, but I’m still likely to stick with the Emergent Task Planner for attacking my day. In a related/unlikely fantasy: I’d love it if OmniGroup eventually breaks Forecast mode off into a more powerful day planner that integrates with OmniFocus. I like the direction that Forecast mode is heading and it will serve as a great “at a glance” option, but without the ability to create a daily schedule, paper still still beat out technology for me here. In my fantasy, there’s also menubar drop down that lets me rearrange my daily schedule, quickly add tasks and complete finished tasks. It’s wonderfully unrealistic.
Review
The few times I’ve used it, I’ve loved the Review mode on the iPad and it looks as if the Mac version will be just as polished. Reviews are often one of the most overlooked aspects of a well maintained task list (and life for that matter). This new feature should make it far easier for new and existing users alike to stay on top of the bigger picture.
The Standard and Pro
OmniFocus for the Mac has always been geared towards power users. The iPad version was far more intuitive, but it was also limited by iOS. Geeks such as myself count on various perspectives to keep us sane and use AppleScripts to hone our own workflows. This makes OmniFocus a powerful tool, but it also makes it a more complicated one.
The OmniGroup seems dedicated to serving both the power user and those who are new to task management (or at least new to OmniFocus). With OmniFocus 2, they plan to accomplish this by splitting the app into two. The exact details are still up in the air, but at the moment, it seems the only omissions between the Pro and Standard versions are the ability to create what are known as custom Perspectives (read: views) and the ability to use AppleScript in order to add functionality to the app.
Steven Hackett voiced some concern that:
Perspectives are a key component of OmniFocus for many users, and while I’m sure that the lower price point will bring many new users to the product, I dislike the stripping of such a great feature just to hit a price point.
While I understand the concern, I’m not sure I agree. I don’t believe this was a decision about price point, I believe it was a matter of diminishing the learning curve. My entre into task management was not through OmniFocus, it was from Things, an app that is more affordable, had a better design and, even though it offered a more limited feature set, it was far easier to get started. For a while I worked happily in Things, but inevitably found myself limited by its approach (and as this was before they offered proper cloud sync, I often found myself losing data between my devices). When the pain became great enough, I decided to make the investment of both time and money in order to get over the initial OmniFocus learning curve. With the standard version, which will offered at a far more palatable $39.99 – half the price of the “Pro” version – this entire process can now happen within OmniFocus.
Steven is right, perspectives are a useful part of the OmniFocus experience, but between Review mode, Forecast view, a more powerful new sidebar and an emphasis on the Focus mode (which is now prevalently featured in the toolbar), a new user will have more than everything they need to get started. They’ll also find less that will cause them to run away screaming.
OmniFocus will be making it possible to upgrade from “Standard” to “Pro”, so new users can look to become power users when the time is right. This will also make the transition from average user to power user a lot smoother. It was disruptive when I moved from the more basic Things to the more robust OmniFocus. Not only did I need to buy an entirely new application, I had to learn it, set it up and manually migrate my data. With “Standard” and “Pro” versions, users will only need to upgrade and be willing to learn a few new tricks.
We’ll have to wait until OmniFocus 2 is available, but I believe the omission of Perspectives and AppleScript will not be a challenge for the majority of entry level users. I also believe it will simplify the first impression just as much – if not more – than the new and intuitive design. And even though a reasonable price should not be an issue for the right tool, the new “Standard” version of OmniFocus 2 will let new users get up and running on the iPhone, iPad and Mac for under $100
The Rest
Are there new features I’d like? Sure. Was I hoping there’d be one super secret “one more thing…” feature? Of course. But here’s the thing: the current version of OmniFocus works for me. It – like every application on the planet – has its shortcomings, but overall, the app works for me as is. I don’t struggle to create tasks, organize them into projects and create views that help me actually get said tasks and projects done. Once OmniGroup has accomplished their goal of getting “Back to the Mac” I do hope they will set their sights on new features including collaboration tools and improvements that in some way address the changing nature of contexts.
I won’t lie… when I initially heard about the “Pro” and “Standard” versions, I was a bit concerned. OmniFocus has always been a power user tool that helps me get things done and while I’m happy to see it improve and become a more intuitive application, I don’t want it to get watered down in order to appeal to a newer customer with simpler needs. You also have to consider that this shift mean that OmniFocus will have to think about improving, maintaining and servicing two versions of the apps rather than one. With a lower price point and a significant feature set, I can see a world where the “Standard” version is popular enough that it could diminish the focus on power user features.
After a few drinks, a good night’s rest and a one-on-one conversation with OmniGroup CEO, Ken Case (which you can get by subscribing to Mike Techniques), I’m confident that the OmniGroup will be there for new and power users alike. We will have to wait impatiently until later in the year when OmniFocus 2 is released, but when it arrives, I’m confident that both users will find everything needed to get started or to just get back to work.
For a more detailed look at the latest announcements, I suggest you read the full announcement on the OmniGroup blog or check out Sven Fechner’s comprehensive thoughts on the upcoming release of OmniFocus 2.
The OmniFocus Setup and was compensated for doing so. I was not asked to write this post and I hope I’ve earned enough of your trust that you know these opinions are not influenced by that fact.Note: I spoke at
If you’re like me, you depend on OmniFocus for Mac. Sure, the iOS version is great for capturing and occasionally checking off tasks, but the Mac is the altar at which I plan, organize, and execute my work. That’s why I am redonkulously excited that OmniFocus 3 is now on the Mac!
While this update offers a number of UI updates and features, the soul of the release is that it now supports a cornucopia of new workflows that weren’t previously possible to set up in OmniFocus 2. It does this by adding three key features that work together to help you organize your work in novel new ways:
- Contexts are now Tags. You can have multiple tags on an item, and you can manually sort items within a tag.
- Custom perspectives are now extremely flexible. OmniFocus Pro’s perspective editor now lets you configure some incredibly useful views.
- The Forecast view is now richer. This makes it more likely to be a place you can spend most of your day.
Together, these three changes make OmniFocus 3 so much more flexible that it’s time to take a long, critical look at your workflow. Your projects and contexts may have made sense a few months or even years ago, but it’s time for a shakeup.
“Hey buddy,” you may protest, “My OmniFocus workflow is a magical garden utopia of productivity and harmony!” And if that’s you, then well, excellent. If you don’t want to take some time to rethink how you choose the work you do, then who am I to judge?
That said, I’m going to be honest here. My workflow is not a magical garden utopia of productivity and peace. At least, not yet.
In fact, most OmniFocus users I know have at least one or two aspects of their task workflow that leave something to be desired. Call your doctor if you experience any of the following symptoms:
- Tending a garden of “overdue” tasks that aren’t technically overdue
- Browsing a 57-item list called “Work Stuff”
- Trying to feed a workflow so fragile that missing a single weekly review sends it into primal chaos
- Looking at particular tasks over and over, slowly wanting them to do them less and less, but not doing anything with them, seriously Allen why is it so hard for you to just call the mechanic before they close at 3pm what is wrong with you Allen?
It’s all right, we can get through this together. In fact, we don’t need a doctor at all. What we need instead is OmniFocus 3, a tasty beverage, and the willingness to blow up our old workflows.
Yes, summer is over, fall has fallen, and it is an excellent time to ask some hard questions and shake up your task management. Pull things apart, try some new approaches on for size. Look critically about how you’re organizing your work, how you could do better work, and how you too can find your garden utopia of productivity.
Or, at least, how you can have less than 13 overdue items at once.
Let’s get to it.
The Top Ten Workflow Questions To Ask Now that OmniFocus 3 is On Your Mac
1. What tags are worth adding to my contexts?
This is most people’s first workflow question about OmniFocus 3. Your tags, née contexts, can now double up or triple up, so you can have an item that is both “Office” and “Today,” or “Home” and “Quick.” Where I previously had a project called “Seasonal Goals” in OmniFocus 2, I’ve now made that a tag. A nice thing about tags is they’re easy to trial — add some, see if they’re useful. If not, try something else.
2. What custom perspectives should I create?
While many OmniFocus 2 Pro users created some variant of “Due or Flagged” to work out of, now custom perspectives can be far more thoughtful and useful than that.
![Omnifocus 2 8 3 8 Omnifocus 2 8 3 8](https://static.thenewsprint.co/media/2014/11/November-iPhone-Homescreen.jpg)
Since you can negate rules, feed custom perspectives with tags, specify “all” or “any” conditions, and even nest rules, it’s now a lot easier to create perspectives you want to spend a lot of time in. Instead of living in the boring old Tags, Projects, and and Review perspectives, it’s worth experimenting with how far you can go with custom perspectives. As a bonus, a complex custom perspective makes for a great horcrux.
There are already some great recent articles on Inside OmniFocus for inspiration, such as Productivity in Three Dimensions. I’ve seen some creative perspectives like “Next Up,” “Stale Items,” “Monday Review,” “Backburner,” “Lazy Day,” and so on.
The limit is your imagination — as long as you have a Pro license, that is.
3. Is now the time to upgrade to OmniFocus Pro?
Yes.
I’m sure the Omni folks would be too nice to say this so plainly, but I say that if you’re into OmniFocus enough to read whole articles about improving your workflow, you’ll get your money’s worth out of OmniFocus Pro.
4. Can I use a combination of custom perspectives and tags to stop using fake due dates?
A common OmniFocus bad habit is choosing arbitrary due dates for a herd of tasks based on when you’d like to have done them. Later, those dates happen to line up, creating roiling mass of not-actually-due-now tasks mixed in with some actually-these-are-due-now grenades. I call this a Due Bomb.
You may also have encountered the Defer Bomb, the result of getting busy and deferring a lot of medium-urgency tasks from your “next” list, which then conspire to all pop back up at once with unpleasant consequences.
The calendar in Forecast can help avoid these problems, but in an ideal world we don’t plan when future tasks should happen using fake due dates. What we really want is metadata — say, a tag or project — to help indicate which items we should be doing now, soon, or someday. We also want a view — say, a custom perspective — to let us see what we should be focusing on now, and what are good candidates to consider doing next.
Once due dates are only used for serious due dates, and you have a working system surfacing medium-urgency items, then you can recruit now-you to choose your day’s work, instead of your longtime nemesis, 3-weeks-ago-you.
5. Should my “Today” list be a tag, or a custom perspective?
Given the flexibility of custom perspectives and tags, it’s possible to build a really slick “Today’s Work” perspective that slices and dices flags, tags, due dates, projects, and other things to propose a hot list of targets for focusing on today. It’s neat.
Neatness aside though, there are two really nice things about having Today be simply a tag. For one, you can manually sort items within a tag, which is handy for a shortlist of your day’s tasks. Secondly, OmniFocus 3 Pro lets you specify a “Today” tag in Forecast, which will display nicely along with your actually-due items, and also enable a handy keyboard shortcut for toggling that tag on any item.
6. How about that Forecast — is it flexible enough that I can use it as my primary view now?
Not everybody used the Forecast view in OmniFocus 2, but it is substantially improved now. If you have OmniFocus 3 Pro and can set a Forecast tag, it’s definitely worth trying out as your working view.
7. Should some of my projects have default tags?
A lot of people manually assign tags to new tasks as they clean out their inbox. That works, but in OmniFocus 3 you’ll likely have more tags than before, and you don’t want clearing your inbox to become a chore worthy of procrastination. Given that, it’s worth remembering that if you assign a tag to a project, and then assign a new item to that project, it’ll inherit that tag. Kinda cool.
8. Can you now re-frame more of your projects to be “completable”?
OmniFocus neophytes typically make broad projects like “Networking.” Rather than being a project per se, this is moreso an “area of responsibility” — something that never really ends, and could accumulate items endlessly. In an ideal world you’d have projects named after goals like “Meet 20 people for coffee in 2018”, or at the very least “Meet more people for coffee.”
Back in the halcyon days of OmniFocus 2, having a lot of projects like this could be unwieldy. Now though, since you can now use tags and flexible perspectives to view different slices across all your projects, you should have a somewhat easier time maintaining more specific, measurable, time-boxed projects now. Which is a Good Thing™.
9. Wait, these custom perspectives really are cool — doesn’t this open up a limitless array of options for tags to organize and plan?
Yes, rhetorical question-asker, now you’ve got it! This question is what flipped me from protective of my old setup into total abandon. As I prepared and researched for this article, I eventually absorbed the scope of how tags and custom perspectives can interact, and what other people were doing with them, and it blew my mind. The next thing I remember, I was writing a 2000-word article about task management workflows.
This week I’ve burned down my projects, scrambled my tags, and tried a half-dozen different ways of looking at the work I do. Yet still, despite the chaos that is my OmniFocus setup, the most pressing thing — this article — got done. The due date on this article’s task pierced the fog, a yellow beacon in the forecast.
Okay okay, I’ll admit it — it was a red beacon.
10. Wait, so you’re saying you, the author of this Inside OmniFocus article and ostensibly a Knowledgeable Person™ about OmniFocus has their workflow in a state of chaos?
Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
Omnifocus 2 8 32
Okay yes, but here’s the thing: it’s been great. The enforced focus of only having my most important work clearly visible has led me to be more focused than I have been in months. I’d set up my tags and projects back in an era where I added maybe 2-4 tasks a day, whereas now I’m capturing 10-20 a day, leading me to be swamped by medium-importance items. The old system wasn’t working, and was ripe for revolution, and between using new capabilities and asking new questions, I’m really optimistic about the new system.
Game 2.8
So, it turns out, sometimes you really do need to blow it all up. And with OmniFocus 3 now bringing some really new workflow options to the Mac, there’s never been a better time than now. Let the creative destruction begin. Tinyalarm 1 9 7 meters.
Omnifocus 2 8 3 Torrent
Allen Pike runs Steamclock Software, a design and development studio focused on making great mobile apps. He writes at allenpike.com and, for better or worse, on Twitter.