What are Perspectives, anyway?
 

Sorry to hijack this thread, but since the initial issue was resolved and mine is related . . . .

Is there some hidden purpose to the iPad perspectives that I'm missing? I have OF for iPad and iPhone, but not the desktop, so I really only understand perspectives from what I've read. I gather that they are something similar to a saved search. I also gather that without the desktop, there's no way to create custom perspectives for iPad/iPhone. But the default "perspective" views that have shown up in my iPad seem to be mostly duplicative of views that are already available on the main page. Is there some way to edit these? Or is there some use that maybe I'm missing?

Thanks.

Stargazer, I'm not an expert in perspectives as I've only recently started to play around with them. Although the added perspectives appear to be the same as the ones on the main page, they are usually subtly different, for example the flagged perspectives - the one has all items, the other only available items.

At the moment it's not possible to create or modify perspectives on the iPad or iPhone, only from the mac. The app is very usable without custom perspectives, but in my opinion much better with them. I don't know if this is something that's being worked on for future versions.

There's no hidden purpose to perspectives, just a way to really slice and dice actions the way you want to see them. It depends on your system (GTD or other) whether you 'need' to use them or not. I think maybe a lot of people won't.

Are you intending to get the mac version at some point? There is a free trial download of Omnifocus for mac to try out. It's pricey, like the rest of the suite, but having tried out most of the competition I think there's nothing more powerful or, for me more stable. However, I will say it took me a few goes until I really 'got it'. I kept going back to another software trying to make it work and it just wouldn't. It wasn't convenient, it was really pretty, but I am very busy and don't have time to worry about the things I was being forced to plan for.

I can now just set Omnifocus and forget it - well, at least relax - everything will show up when it needs to. Worth every penny, and the terrific support - that's really worth it to me. YMMV of course.

Stargazer, I moved your post out into a new thread - if other folks have the same question, they may search and find it more easily this way.

Marisa's answer is pretty much spot-on. Don't have much to add except to say that we hide them by default in an attempt to avoid confusing folks by having multiple (similar but not identical) views with the same names.

We don't currently have a way to create perspectives on the iPad, but if that would be useful, email the [EMAIL="omnifocus-ipad@omnigroup.com"]support ninjas[/EMAIL] and we can add you to the feature request open on that. Thanks!