Is OmniFocus 4 a fantasy? Omnifocus 3 is very buggy on Sonoma and today’s update blew up OmniFocus on my MacBook Pro M2. Now all I get is a crashcatcher window and cannot open OmniFocus on my Mac. Not acceptable.
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That sounds very stressful. I’m on the beta of OmniFocus 4, through the app TestFlight. It still has two bugs I’ve been dealing with, but is generally excellent and has no issue with Sonoma. They’ve been working very hard on it. As soon as it’s a final release, I’ll be a happy subscriber. Maybe you can get on the OF4 beta and see if you can open your OF3 file in it?
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Thanks for your response. I am in the middle of a busy day and will try to do that later. Guess I’ll just have to use OmniFocus on my iPad to get my work done today.
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On the OG slack channel there is some discussion on the OF3 issues. There is a new update working its way through approval.
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The march towards the release of Omnifocus 4 has been utterly glacial. I’ve been on the OF4 beta for months and it is still buggy.
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It’s a complex product, which they’ve rewritten from the ground up and are also adding features to. Omni are taking their time to get it right. I have no problem with that.
Usually this would have happened behind the scenes to the point of late Beta, but they’d inviting customers to take part.
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I appreciate them getting it right. But it is a complex product? I appreciate it is done well. But isn’t it a database running various queries? I say that as a fairly long time user…
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The bigger problem I had when I was on the OF4 beta, is that it was still nearly as ugly as it always has been (subjective, I know) and I thought it was in desperate need of refinement: someone just sitting down and looking at how users interact with it, like it’s not 1985 any more, could make a major difference.
Getting things right takes time, but to take a lot of time and not get it significantly more right is a bit sad.
I know lots of people love OF. I depended on it for years but I never really loved it.
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That’s true on the back-end, and they haven’t spent much time on OF’s data approach. The complexity is all on the UI side. It took them a long time to design out how to show more information/features on phones, especially. They took a lot of feedback along the way. The other part that’s taking awhile is moving their interface code to SwiftUI.
If Apple were a couple years further ahead on their development of SwiftUI I think it’d have been a significantly faster beta period, but the design challenges would still have taken awhile.
And to @chrisecurtis 's point, they really needed an additional designer on the project. They could’ve solved more UX challenges in the same amount of time. The utility is super high in the current state of 4.0 for people comfortable with OF, though.
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Funnily enough I installed the betas again a few day ago. I used OF for 10+ until switching to Things a couple of years ago. With growing responsibilities and a recent feeling of being a bit overwhelmed I decided to take another look at OF.
Things has a beautiful UI and great keyboard shortcuts, but I’ve been missing the review feature, filters and the ability to put a project on pause, when you have a lot of active projects the Things sidebar can look pretty overwhelming.
I’d love to go back onto OF but the UI feels very dated now, as a designer I can’t help but notice spacing in the UI being uneven and the animations and scrolling are not smooth. I’ll keep my eye on the betas but at the moment it doesn’t feel like an app that I can live with. I’d love the power of OmniFocus with the design of Things.
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I’m on the beta for OF4 too. I’m not a designer, nor do I work in tech, but to my (untrained) eyes, the UI in OF4 is a significant improvement on OF3, which I felt was really clunky. There are certainly some bugs in the manner in which the data displays (tags being the classic example). I do wonder if it will improve as the beta progresses.
The age-old dilemma. 
I’d expect animation performance to improve between now and release, though. They aren’t in the phase where they’re polishing that yet.