OmniFocus GTD app goes into public beta
The OmniGroup has announced 
the public beta of OmniFocus, its much talked-about “Getting Things Done” (GTD) app.
In short, it looks good. The press release promises that OmniFocus will help “you work smarter by giving you powerful tools for staying on track of all the things you need to do.” And it lives up to its promise, even in beta form.
GTD Old-timers will immediately recognise OmniFocus’s roots in KinklessGTD , Ethan Schoonover’s collection of applescripts for Getting Things Done with OmniGroup’s OmniOutliner. (Ethan has been a key colloborator on the project and is now OmniGroup’s Head of Marketing.)
For a while, it was the market-leader for its comprehensiveness, its Quicksilver integration and ability to sync smoothly with iCal.
These strengths are carried over into OmniFocus.
The interface has that reassuring Kinkless look:
Depending on whether it is running in Planning or Contexts mode, it lists your projects or your contexts in the lefthand-side column, and the matching content on the righthand-side.
It aims to provide “a big bucket” or comprehensive features for gathering actions or tasks that you need to get done. There’s no point having a GTD app if it can’t easily capture the totality of your tasks, however they come in or occur to you.
To this end, while Quicksilver provided much of the gathering grunt in Kinkless, OminFocus has its own, built-in, system-wide Quick entry tool, with a keyboard shortcut that can be customised in the app’s Preferences:
It also offers a clipping service, that is the ability to clip information from apps like Safari, NetNewsWire and Mail.app when creating a task:
It will even copy across the MailTags project for a clipping if a matching one exists in OmniFocus.
Tabbing across the name of the task, the project, the context and the due date is quick and easy. It even knows that tomorrow is Monday, 19 November. (UPDATE: In order to see the Due Date field in the Quick Entry pane, you will need first to Check the View > Columns > Due Date option in OmniFocus.)
It is also possible to email tasks to yourself, using the Mail rule that OmniFocus installs for you, which automatically shunts any email with a subject line starting with “– ” (or whatever you set in the preferences) into its Inbox for processing later, then archiving the email into the folder you choose.
The collecting process has been carefully thought through, and it shows. Nice.
Processing tasks, sorting them into projects and the contexts in which they can be done, is done in the app’s Inbox. It’s all tab-friendly and it’s smart — auto-matching of existing projects and contexts and smart parsing of dates makes the processing quick and consistent.
Syncing with iCal is even smarter than I remember it in Kinkless. OmniFocus now allows you to decide which iCal calendar to use for which contexts, reducing the clutter in iCal and making for better “synergy” between my Omnifocus office context and iCal work calendar:
And of course it makes use of the new Leopard Mail.app-iCal to-do syncing, which brings OmniFocus to-dos through into Mail.app’s to-do list, each one optionally prefixed with its Omnifocus context:
Thanks to the magic of iPhone, I then have my to-dos with me wherever I go (although not the clipped information which is unhelpfully wrapped up in a mime attachment).
(UPDATE: There is a trick here though. By default, to-dos piped into Mail.app are stored in the “On My Mac” to-do folder. It’s a pain, but you can drag them into the to-do mailbox of an account that your iPhone checks. Obviously, it would be better if this was automated but I don’t think that you can apply rules to to-dos.)
Still, if you take care in writing the names of your to-dos, the iPhone will even highlight the phone number of the person you need to call:
Unfortunately, my iPhone can’t take a photo of itself. Apologies for the quality.
I am liking this app very much, much better than other GTD solutions for Mac users. I took advantage of the special pre-release offer about fifteen minutes after installing the beta.
OmniFocus is available for a limited time at the pre-release price of USD 39.95 (and 25% cheaper than that for people who have a OmniOutliner 3.0 licence. So, it only cost me USD 29.95).
When released on 8 January it will sell for USD 79.95. Expensive, you say? You’re right. Good value, you ask? It depends what your time is worth.
You can also watch Ethan showing off OmniFocus at length in a new fifteen minute video tour or download the “At-a-glance” Quick Reference Chart. Links on OmniGroup’s OmniFocus web page .
Similar Posts:
- OmniFocus’ new tricks: Notifications, iPhone syncing
- EasyTask Manager 2.0 “syncs” with iPhone
- kGTD 0.83.0 released
- Printing to-do lists from Mail.app
- EasyTask Manager for getting things done
Tags: Apple Mail, getting things done, gtd, iCal, iphone, kinkless, mail.app, omnifocus, Productivity, sweet as a nut
November 18th, 2007 at 10:35 pm
HANG ON How did you get the To Dos to your iPhone? This is the most wanted feature on my list right now!! Please email me…
November 18th, 2007 at 10:40 pm
Well, that does look promising. That they’ve done such integration with Mail.app, iCal and the iPhone is quite nice as I’ve only just gotten used to the idea of using Mail for to-dos (sort of a gateway drug to GTD).
November 18th, 2007 at 10:56 pm
I’ve been using OmniFocus for months and would find it hard to go back to a time when I didn’t use it to track all those odd things I had to remember. I bought my license within minutes of it being possible. It’s also worth noting that those with an OmniOutliner Pro licence will get an additional discount.
November 19th, 2007 at 12:36 am
Please do share how you got ToDo’s on your iPhone! This is a killer feature! I have tried to figure out how you did this, but can’t.
November 19th, 2007 at 2:08 am
Could you also tell us how you’re managing to enter due dates in your quick-entry panel? I’m currently running the latest version of OF and I can’t seem to configure the app this way.
November 19th, 2007 at 2:20 am
please tell me how this app is better than iGTD? i’ve been using iGTD exclusively for about the past year while waiting for this app to be developed and the great things about iGTD are:
- it doesn’t want I need it to do
- has great features (Quicksilver integration, universal app integration)
- and it’s free!
November 19th, 2007 at 6:41 am
@Paul, all I am doing in entering the date (“19/11/07″, Monday”, etc) into the field and then hitting the enter key. Nothing more magical than that.
November 19th, 2007 at 6:54 am
Hi, thanks Tim. Turns out that in order to make the field available in the quick-entry panel, you have to activate the corresponding column in the main planning view, then relaunch the app.
November 19th, 2007 at 7:01 am
Ah, yes. That would be an important first step. I didn’t think of mentioning that. Thanks for picking that gap up.
November 19th, 2007 at 7:06 am
Tim, let us know who you got the ToDos from Mail to appear in your iPhone . . .
November 19th, 2007 at 7:57 am
I thought you were in Australia.
How do you have an iphone?
November 19th, 2007 at 8:49 am
@Tony — The solution is not very elegant but it works:
I will do it as the last task of the day, then they will be waiting for me in the morning. It’s worth it (for me).
November 19th, 2007 at 8:51 am
@phil – I can’t possibly comment.
November 19th, 2007 at 10:50 am
Tim,
Arggggg I am so jealous!!!!
November 19th, 2007 at 4:52 pm
Tim, I’ve been trying to drag to do’s to my IMAP account that is set up to sync with my iPhone, but they don’t stick to anything… How do I create a Mail Calendar, does it show up among the IMAP Folders? I can create a note, though, that’s good, that will sync, but To Do – can you make a tutorial w screenshots?
November 19th, 2007 at 5:18 pm
Regarding this “todo on my iPhone”.
I created several todos in Leopard’s Mail.app. Then I connected my iPhone and RESYNCED my mail account settings. Voila – the folder “apple mail todo” is now visible on the iPhone and shows all todos.
I have no idea about how to edit this or enter a new one. Seems like one-way only….
November 20th, 2007 at 8:04 am
Hi Tim and alex, Ive been trying all day to create an “Apple mail todo calendar” thing on my imap account, but no success. Can you elaborate on how to make them belong to a certain imap account instead of This Computer?
November 20th, 2007 at 9:35 am
svante: I’m flying around the country at the moment on an academic junket. When I get back I’ll knock something out.
November 20th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
I actually got it working at last. Here’s how I did it. I couldn’t by any way drag or create a subfolder to the ToDos in Mail (the same manner as Notes or actually any IMAP subfolder). What I did was I opened the Mail folder in Finder at /User/me/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/ and duplicated the Notes.mbox folder that I could see was syncing to my IMAP account. I renamed it Todos.mbox and removed all messages. Now in Mail, under the Todo icon, there was a subfolder with the same name as my IMAP account! After syncing with my iPhone I could see the longed Apple Mail Todo” Folder.
My ToDos looks pretty shitty on the iPhone though, maybe because of my ugly workaround, because the todo is in the subject field and above is a bold (No Sender) field where the sender is in all mails.
Hopefully someone will make sure this works better, and is easier to set up, and inshallah, maybe we can even start using them as todos on the iPhone, yeah, maybe even editing would be possible one beautiful day. This is still a mystery to me, how could Apple leave this feature out????
November 20th, 2007 at 9:11 pm
An interesting observation: if I open a Todo in my webmail, I can read all the information – notes, due date, contacts, priorities, calendar etc…
I hope someone finds out how to parse this information – hell, even a native app in IPhone could do this?!
November 21st, 2007 at 7:59 am
I dunno, I’m finding that OF–>iPhone–>OF is too fiddly to be very practical.
1) Create a task in OF with context of @iPhone
2) Sync OF to iCal (works very nicely)
3) Move task from @iPhone calendar On My Mac to IMAP calendar (this gets the task into Mail and into the Apple Mail To-Dos folder in the Mail application on the iPhone.
But here it breaks down. There’s no way to “check off” the task. You can
a.) Mark it Unread (sometimes it doesn’t stay unread)
b.) Delete it
c.) Move it to a Done folder that you’ve set up in your IMAP account.
Whichever step you choose, you have to remember to go back and tick the item off in OmniFocus. There’s no upstream sync from iPhone–>Mail–>iCal–>Omnifocus that I can see.
November 21st, 2007 at 8:07 am
Phil, you’ve posted the post that I was going to post! Thanks.
You’re right it is not a perfect system by any means. But until MailTags gets its to-dos back – hopefully integrated with Leopard Mail’s to-do system, it’s the best solution that I know of.
What will you use instead?
November 21st, 2007 at 1:52 pm
For what it’s worth, we at Omni are all very interested in getting OmniFocus content on the iPhone (The Omni Group is pretty much 99% iPhone users, so we have a dog in this fight). Rest well assured that as soon as we have options for doing this in a way that allows reasonable functionality, we’ll be on it.
-Ethan
November 21st, 2007 at 2:01 pm
Mr Schoonover! Great to hear from you. The ability to save particular contexts in a calendar connected to a Mail account would be a great bonus. Glad to hear that something is on the cards.
November 21st, 2007 at 2:04 pm
Hey Tim, Thanks. It’s nice to be resurfacing a bit now that OmniFocus is getting closer to done. We’ll keep you posted on progress on this front… :)