OmniFocus 4 4+

Not sure yet

So I had massive freezing and crashing problems with this initially. I think it requires more free space on your iPhone. Cleared that up and deleted completed projects and that helped. I still find the layout confusing and have spent too much time trying to figure it out…still haven’t quite…yet even with the tutorial and not sure how to get the plugins to work on iPhone…. All that said…feels like it has potential…

Update: Nope still freezing like crazy back to 1 star….it always starts out fully expanded and that crashes my app because I have so many projects. Please let me go back to Omni3. Update still crashing despite uninstalling and reinstalling and having 10GB free space

Update again: their update seems to have fixed the major freezing issues. Back up to 4 stars.

Developer Response ,

Sorry for the trouble! OmniFocus 4.2, released today, substantially improved performance on iPhone. If you’re still experiencing this issue after updating, could you reach out to our Support team for further assistance? They can be reached via email at omnifocus@omnigroup.com, and would also be happy to help you get up and running with plug-ins on your iPhone. Thanks!

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.

Why I switched to todoist

For almost 17 years, I ran my entire life off of OmniFocus. As long as I was managing only my own life and didn’t have to worry about working and coordinating with a team, OmniFocus was fantastic. I wrote grants, manage research projects for work and also mapped out and managed any project in my personal life and OmniFocus made it easy. However, in the last six months, I found that it was no longer sufficient to meet my needs because my research team had gotten significantly larger and I needed to keep track of tasks for multiple people across multiple states over several years. Despite many request by users over the years to add team based features, OmniFocus never evolved beyond developing excellent tools for a single individuals to keep track of things. Todoist was simply a far superior software package for managing more complex projects and teams, so I reluctantly made the switch and have found Todoist to be almost perfect for my newer and more complex work and personal life.