OmniFocus - Address Book Integration
 

I work in technology consulting and have OmniFocus on. My Mac, iPad and iPhone. I make a lot of entries to make calls to client contacts and suppliers and would be an extremely happy chappie if once my call is due, I am able to make the call from within the app and not have to navigate away from it, launch my address book, search for the contact and then dial - is this possible or in development at the moment?

Well, somehow you need to link an address book contact to an action, right? If, when you create the action, you paste the phone number from the address book into the note of the action, you can later dial by just tapping on the link (or email, if you did this with an email address instead of a phone number). Yeah, it could be coded up so you didn't have to open the address book to do that, but you can have most of the functionality right now.

That would be something I would find very useful as well.

[QUOTE=LAUK66;98186]I work in technology consulting and have OmniFocus on. My Mac, iPad and iPhone. I make a lot of entries to make calls to client contacts and suppliers and would be an extremely happy chappie if once my call is due, I am able to make the call from within the app and not have to navigate away from it, launch my address book, search for the contact and then dial - is this possible or in development at the moment?[/QUOTE]

Setting it up that way is a lot of work, though, if you compare it to using LaunchBar, Alfred, or even Spotlight to call up the information almost immediately.

I can get a phone # in about 1/2 second with Launchbar by just typing command-space and then 3 characters of the name, and hitting right arrow to get all the contacts phone #'s. It's faster than expanding the notes and viewing the info in OmniFocus, for certain.

We do have feature requests (yes plural - for the various editions of the app) filed on this. Folks can email the [EMAIL="omnifocus@omnigroup.com"]support ninjas[/EMAIL] and let us know they'd also like to see this added. We generally give priority to the most popular change requests. Thanks, all!

[quote=CatOne]
I can get a phone # in about 1/2 second with Launchbar by just typing command-space and then 3 characters of the name, and hitting right arrow to get all the contacts phone #'s. It's faster than expanding the notes and viewing the info in OmniFocus, for certain.
[/quote]
But that isn't going to be much help on your iPhone when not at your Mac, is it? Speaking for myself (w/o iPhone service), most phone numbers I embed in notes are for those who aren't in my address book. On the Mac, I'm happy to use Spotlight to pull up a number quickly for a regular contact, but don't want to clutter my address book further with numbers/contacts likely to be used only once. If I'm working from the iPad or iPod, I might well not have any internet connectivity, so a few seconds to bring up the note vs. maybe not making the call is a good tradeoff. The phone call is likely to be much longer than either lookup :-)

I am actually shocked to find that Omnifocus does not integrate with Address Book. That, and Calendar integration, are the essence of an organizer and scheduler.

Sam

It's a good thing that OmniFocus isn't a scheduler and/or organizer then, they would have failed miserably. Luckily, it's a task manager, and a very good one at that.

Having contacts and a reduced calendar integrated would be a benefit in my eyes, especially for those of us who use the mobile versions in business life. An organizer should save me time which also means it should hold all needed information (contact data, calendar entries and tasks) ready for quick access.

On the other hand there is Pocket Informant, which is, after the major update that took 8 months to come, as miserable as it has been since it started on the iPhone. I really do not want OF to go anywhere near that level of failure.

If you're looking for something that does it all, then take a look at Daylite for the Mac and Daylite Touch for iPad and iPhone. Daylite does a great job as a contact / calendar / task / project / and information manager all in one, and syncs well with the mobile platforms. I comes with a built-in server app that allows you to keep all three in sync using dyndns.org if you don't have a static IP. I used it for about a year and a half.

Unfortunately, it does all of the functions well, but OmniFocus does task management REALLY well. And in my business life, task management and project management are very important. I don't mind using separate apps to achieve what I need as long as they all are the best in what they do, I'm not willing to settle for less. I use OmniFocus, OmniPlan, BusyCal, and Address Book to do what I need.