Have you requested each of these from these features via the support email address?
If not I suggest you do so they’re aware you would like them.
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Depends on how you got it. On IOS/ipadOS/macOS app store, search for the app, open it’s page and update.
Otherwise your macOS should prompt you to upgrade.
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Repeatedly over several years.
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I’m not sure a technical limitation around syncing from 15 years ago is still applicable today.
Omnifocus development is both glacial and conservative, I suspect it’s just too too big a job for them to bother with.
Alternatively, very few people have requested the feature or maybe Omni don’t see it as part of the product moving forward.
While Omni like to consider customer feedback for the product, it’s their product and their vision and they decide what features they add.
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A quick browse of the OF forum will show this isn’t just me asking.
I don’t know if the word glacial is the right word. It’s slow but steady progress. OF4 has definitely changed from v4.0 to 4.7. It’s progressing at a thoughtful pace. If a developer tried to race so fast in the development stage, haphazard features can be disruptive.
Coding and UX design changes slowly over time.
Heck, iPadOS can be considered glacial. But it’s nice to see it evolve over time…
What I would prefer is to have the OmniFocus Forecast evolve from their list based view and include a monthly calendar view showing my tasks and calendar events mixed in. It’s time to flex a little away from the database list view to a more graphic layout. Kanban view has been something that has been rumored to be looked at. But first, Omni had to create mutually exclusive tags to lay the foundation for Kanban.
Keep sending feedback to their support email. Every voice counts.
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I think I’m mostly influenced by Omnifocus 4, which was in beta for a whopping 2 and half years and was still buggy on release. I also think about how long people were asking for simple things like seeing your Inbox in the Projects view or having more than one tag (context) on an action. These took years to implement.
I can understand the logic behind the forecast view, as it obviates the need for additional server elements or worrying about third party APIs. But its not a calendar replacement by any means. I have a complex worklife and so I live out of my calendar, and if I have anything time- or day-specific, I want it to be in there.
Yes, but if it’s 15 people asking out of 10,000 users, it’s negligible.
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I’m prepared to cut Omni a lot of slack on their approach because they’ve earned it in the 15ish years I’ve been using OmniFocus. They are transparent in where their product is going, albeit in the past a little too optimistic on timescales, and create great quality products which provide amazing value. If they doubled their Single License costs, I’d still pay it, and if they went subscription only with the same sub pricing they currently offer, I’d also pay. It’s worth stating that when you buy a Single Pro license for £140 (only £70 to upgrade from ANY previous Pro version), it works across all platforms (except OF for the Web) and on previous history each version is good for at least 5 years.
During the OF 4 Beta (and longer before that) Omni rewrote the whole application across 5 (iPhone, iPad, macOS, Watch, and visionOS) platforms in Swift. It was a massive lift on what was a quickly moving development language and, albeit with some bugs on release, they did a fantastic job.
Given the length of time OmniFocus has been developed for (more than 15 years on iPad alone which is when I started using it), I’m not surprised at the amount of time it took them to allow multiple Tags instead of a single Context (I was someone calling for them at the time), their whole database and code was based on an assumption that there would only ever be a single Context (a la GTD) it took a lot of work to re-engineer to allow multiple tags. Again, it was done in a reasonable way, and it certainly wasn’t simple. Would I have liked it sooner, of course, but Omni set their product direction, not me, and I trust them.
People think that a lot of software is simple under the hood, it really isn’t even if it looks it.
I feel your frustration with Omni, but I don’t agree with it and in fact I think your criticism is unfair. But I’m done on this topic now.
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If you’d tried a number a little higher than 15, your speculation might have sounded plausible.
Interestingly from their blog post on the release of 4.7 they mention the new repeat feature was only requested by 400 users. Seems like a low number for one of their “most highly highly-requested” features.
If Planned Dates have attracted the most attention, and mutually exclusive tags are my personal favorite feature, the ability to set limits on repeating item was the most highly highly-requested feature we built into this release (with almost 400 customers requests over the last 15 years, but who’s counting)!
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Businesses can generally assume that for every person who makes a formal piece of feedback, several more feel the same way but didn’t bother to use the formal mechanism. That’s true of compliments and complaints as well. I imagine its as much the ratio as the total number that led them to consider Planned Dates as the most sought after feature.
That’s why companies (well, good ones at least) keep an eye on social media & online fora in order to judge levels of interest in their business or product, because informal commentary and feedback is so much more readily available than formal.
It also helps you avoid the vocal minority problem, where a small number of people get outsized influence simply because they’re the only ones bothered enough to use formal mechanisms. This is particularly a problem with public services like hospitals and schools.
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OF is 4.7 is awesome so far. I’ve only used the catch-up feature for repeating tasks, but I’m going start to use the exclusive tag probably this weekend when I have some free time to think out through.
I recently returned to OF after trying ToDoist and Apple Reminders task managers, and I’m glad to be back. OF fits me like a glove!
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IIRC, Omni doesn’t want to add a user preference for tag/due date inheritance. I don’t think it’s a development speed issue.
I’m sure they’re thinking about how they can solve the reason behind not wanting tags and due dates to inherit. If you send them use cases and reasoning they save it in their feature request database.
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I can informally say I will vote for a political candidate in my hometown. But it doesn’t mean anything until I formally vote for that person when I’m at the voting booth.
Omni does remind the users that they do scan their forums but ask them to send in an email to help register in their database. They acknowledge they might miss something when forum scanning.
And I’d rather have them spend time developing rather than hitting the Reddit channels all day long.
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What would scrolling through Reddit looking for bug reports or feature requests be called ? “Doom scrolling” is already taken.
Dev Scrolling?
Doom Development?
Other?
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It depends on whether you’re interested in customer feedback or not. And I don’t say that as a loaded statement, Steve Jobs was famously cool on customer feedback on the basis that he felt Apple knew better than their customers what they wanted. Not every company should or does worry about it.
But if you are interested in customer feedback, then you need to gather that feedback outside formal mechanisms to have any hope that it’s comprehensive. For example people who stop using a product because they don’t like it will almost never take the time to email and explain why, and yet their insights are certain to be among the most valuable. And for a product the size of OF, that’s not going to take long. It’s not McDonalds.
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