Which leads me to the big head scratcher: Why doesn’t OmniFocus for iOS have a quick capture field that supports the same kind of natural language input? Why make the URL scheme more powerful than the actual app? I do not know. Even shorthand terms like “5d” for five days in the future or “3w” for three weeks work. Most of the common natural language dates work with this trick. This action inserts the tag and then puts the cursor in the attribute field so I can quick add a date. I’m using the tag so much now that I created a new Drafts keyboard action just for inserting it. Even better, I can put one task on each line of a Draft to create multiple tasks at once. If I add a known context like then OF applies that context to that task. For example, if I add a tag with a date like “next Wednesday” OmniFocus correctly parses the date and sets it as the due date for the task. Here’s the entirety of the Drafts action:Īs long as I use a minimal set of TaskPaper terminology I can create a task in OmniFocus with dates and contexts right in my OmniFocus Inbox. The new “paste” action is quite powerful yet simple enough to use from almost anywhere. 2 It uses the new URL scheme and OmniFocus' support for TaskPaper as an interchange format to create a task with natural language and common sense inputs. This action for Drafts is the key to it all. With the new “paste” URL action in OmniFocus Drafts is the perfect springboard as well. So it was a natural place for me to start when working with TaskPaper on iOS. Whenever an idea starts with words, I launch Drafts before I even decide where those words need to be. It’s simple and fast but has enough flexibility to do almost anything I need to do with text. Drafts Inboxĭrafts is one of my most used apps on iOS. Here’s what works for me and what is still a problem. I’ve been back with OmniFocus for about 3 months. It’s not all roses but it’s a powerful and flexible system that I can recommend to anyone on iOS and the Mac. The OmniFocus URL scheme is still under development and thankfully recent comments by Omni on their forum suggest they see this as an important area of innovation.Īfter two years of using TaskPaper and plain text as my main task tracking system, I’ve switched back to OmniFocus. Ken also has a quick intro to automation from Editorial on iOS. 1 In it, Ken Case describes using the “paste” function to create entire project hierarchies. There’s a nice intro to automation with the OmniFocus URL scheme on the Omni forums plus a quick little example on the Inside OmniFocus site. The updates this year for OmniFocus on iOS added an extended URL scheme which really caught my attention and solved one of the longterm problem gaps: natural language quick capture. But I never stopped watching the OmniFocus development. The value to friction ratio was far too low to sustain my work so I moved to TaskPaper. Too many of the features I counted on were cut or became more awkward. The transition to OmniFocus 2 killed my interest in the system. The power of the perspectives and the incredible quick capture on the Mac was groundbreaking. Then The Omni Group released OmniFocus and set a the gold standard in task management for both Mac and iOS. Those early days with Kinkless and GTD felt a bit revolutionary. My history with OmniFocus goes back to OmniOutliner on the Mac and the miraculous Kinkless GTD (thanks Ethan!).
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |