5/16 OmniFocus Alpha Notes

[BwanaZulia]

I have been waiting for this for 6 months so I am just pleased as punch to get it this morning. Here is my quick thoughts after playing with it for 20 minutes or so.

The good:
- Imported from kGTD with ease. All projects, tasks, contexts (hundreds)
- Interface looks and feels like an OSX app, it is unobtrusive. Very Omni.
- Folders are great and a good way to further organize my 100+ projects
- Filters work as advertised. On projects, on tasks, etc.
- Focus is a great idea and does help one do just that, show me just one project/folder
- Quick entry works and allows the easy creation of Projects and Contexts. Basically a place where you could spend a lot of your project planning and capture. Brain dump.

The Bad:
- Didn't get kGTD history (archive)
- No full iCal synch yet (Contexts = Calendars)
- No repeat, renew, recur events

The Ugly:
- Speed. I know OmniObjectMeter is in there, but man-o-man is it slow. 20 seconds to change my view on anything.
- The wait. :)

The Suggestions:
- When in any filter view, give me the count at the bottom (4 of 40 projects, 60 of 239 tasks etc) kinda like Excel.
- Please import my kGTD archive it has years worth of valuable stuff
- Templates (as mentioned before in "Canned projects" thread)
- Full iCal support, just like kGTD would be good enough for 1.0.

Overall this application when released will be a hit. It has so much potential for the future with connections to Mail and OmniPlan as well as things that will be available in Tiger's Mail.

So very much to look forward to.

BZ

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=1884

[brianogilvie]

One point to add to "the bad":

Sometimes the ordering of projects in project view gets screwed up. I imported my kGTD file (not as big as BZ's) and then dragged my projects into order with folders. The OF project list listed them in the same order.

I discovered, though, that sometimes when I switch into Context view and then back into Project view, especially if I have been jumping between contexts or filtering tasks, the ordering of my projects in project view gets screwed up: both the order in the left-hand project pane and the ordering in the outline (the two are not always the same, by the way).

Solution: quit OmniFocus, trash the prefs, and relaunch. I lose the handful of preferences I have set but the project list is back in the correct order. It looks like something in the preferences is getting corrupted.

[HiramNetherlands]

Thanks for the mini-review. I hope to get my hands on the beta, too, some day, so I can see it for myself, but what you write sounds very good indeed. This might just be the GTD-app I have been waiting for.

A few questions: Is there Spotlight integration? How does linking files work? Is Mail.app integration functioning? In an obvious way? And finally: how were your second 20 minutes of using the app?

[BwanaZulia]

A few questions: Is there Spotlight integration? How does linking files work? Is Mail.app integration functioning? In an obvious way? And finally: how were your second 20 minutes of using the app?

Don't think Spotlight is in there, but didn't try. Linking files is said to be a 1.0 feature, again, not sure if it is in. No Mail integration yet.

Seconds? I meant minutes. 20 seconds was waiting for each view to load.

BZ

[rish]

Seconds? I meant minutes. 20 seconds was waiting for each view to load.

BZ
What does this mean? 20 seconds to switch from projects to contexts' view and vice versa? nothing like this is evident from ethan's screencast..

[bushford]

It's quite slow switching from contexts to projects and between projects, but I understand this is due the ObjectMeter stuff that's been compiled in to help identifying and diagnosing bugs...

[rish]

ohhh man.......that blows -(
i was hoping the alpha version to be similar to ethan's

[BwanaZulia]

What does this mean? 20 seconds to switch from projects to contexts' view and vice versa? nothing like this is evident from ethan's screencast..

I don't think Ethan had as man tasks/projects as I do.

7 Seconds to switch from Projects to Contexts.

The release notes say it is OmniObjectMeter.

BZ

[SpiralOcean]

I had a file with very few tasks... three projects and three contexts and maybe 10 tasks. I witnessed the same slowdown and attributed it to the Zombie mode.

But I was also testing it with Applescript, and making new projects & tasks and the applescript was referencing entire objects instead of id's. After restarting the program, it was faster.

[rish]

I had a file with very few tasks... three projects and three contexts and maybe 10 tasks. I witnessed the same slowdown and attributed it to the Zombie mode.

But I was also testing it with Applescript, and making new projects & tasks and the applescript was referencing entire objects instead of id's. After restarting the program, it was faster.

I don't know anything about applescript. Are you saying that once you have few tasks, restarting the app will make it work faster?

[SpiralOcean]

You almost sound surprised by these statements? Maybe I am misinterpreting the tone.

I'm saying it may not be about the amount of tasks you have, but about how much you are changing the tasks. How many new tasks are being made and moved and deleted. How much objects are being created, used & destroyed. With the applescript I modified I was doing a lot of creating and deleting, and within an hour the app slowed to a crawl. Even when I only had 5 tasks. After restarting the app, it was much snappier.

My guess is there is some process that cleans up the logs or frees up memory or something when the app is restarted.

But the real monster that is slowing it down is addition of OmniObjectMeter in the code right now. This is doing a lot of logging to try and catch bugs and inefficiencies in the code.
http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=3580
http://www.omnigroup.com/developer/omniobjectmeter/

And yes... restarting the app after using it for a while does make it run faster... for a bit.

Want to test this for yourself?

Run this applescript. (you don't have to know anything about it to run it, just hit the play key in the script editor)

It will generate 5 projects, 5 contexts and 50 tasks.
Then delete all but 1 task 1 project and 1 context.
still runs slow
now quit and restart OF.
Notice a change in speed?

[rish]

i see what you mean, spiralocean. i'll run the script once i get my invite.

btw, i still wonder what version of omnifocus is running in ethan's screencast, because it seems to be working fine (not slow, mind you)

[SpiralOcean]

could have been an earlier version where they didn't have OmniObjectMeter turned on. Or he could have just started the application.

[SpiralOcean]

You do know that these are alpha versions... right? These versions, including Ethan's screencast are not complete full versions. They are full of bugs.

[Ken Case]

could have been an earlier version where they didn't have OmniObjectMeter turned on.

Exactly. Ethan posted his video on May 15, and we didn't add OmniObjectMeter allocation tracking (which can be very slow) until May 16.

We're all looking forward to being able to turn that off again, so please be sure to run the latest release and send in every crash report! (If you don't run the latest release, you'll be sending in reports for crashes we've already fixed.) Thank you!