OmniFocus 2 is a very anticipated update to the excellent OmniFocus suite. In these last few weeks, I’ve been hard at work helping The Omni Group push OF2 to its limits to make sure it’s working well for its ultimate release.
I thought I’d take a moment to mention some immediate impressions …
Overall, its a very nice upgrade. There are several changes and improvements to the workflow that I am gradually learning and developing workflows around.
In particular, perspectives are a huge part of what make OmniFocus work for me. So, I’ve been keeping a close eye on their use in OF 2. So far so good, and there are indeed improvements.
As an example, the perspective selections we’ve come to know in the iOS versions of OmniFocus have made their way over:
Forecast mode is there along with Review and the other familiar options. The professional edition allows you to also create custom perspectives, much as we’ve had with OF1. Here you can see I’ve added Family, Communications, and Filing to the side bar.
I’ll find that I set up a series of perspectives to work through depending on where I am. For example, if I’m at the office, I’ll set up my “office only” then “office” perspectives. That way I get through things that can only be done at the office first, followed by things I can do at the office as well as at home.
You can also see that there have been changes to how perspectives can be designed:
Also, very neat is that you can get to a perspective’s settings quickly using the tool bar:
As much as I enjoy fiddling with the details of perspective settings, I prefer to work from a state of simplicity. I had worried that the simple lists I could create with OF1 would be gone. However, this is not true:
More can certainly be said, but for now I’m back to testing …
