OmniFocus URL Support -- Community Feedback
 

Hello OmniFocus Community,

As many of you have requested, we are preparing to deliver on OmniFocus URL support. In case you have no idea what I'm talking about click this link:

[URL="omnifocus:"]omnifocus:[/URL]

If you have OmniFocus installed, it should have either activated OmniFocus, or launched it if you didn't have it open. Pretty neat! The next step is determining how you want to use OmniFocus URLs, and what we want to support sooner, and what we want to add in later.

Some common use cases will be to have a link to a specific Project or Action in your Focus file that you want to be able to click on to access from another application, or to link inside of Focus. These URLs will most likely look like:
("task" will be either an action or project.)

omnifocus://{task,context,folder}/[id1],[optional-id2]


Note that this URL has support for opening 2 different items, but you will only be able to open one type (2 Actions ok, 1 Action and 1 Context? not supported).

[b]What else do you want?[/b]

Here is where you come in. We've considered adding searching support, multiple windows, and perspectives all available from URLs. However, we don't yet have compelling use-cases for these.

If you're interested in using OmniFocus URLs please let us know what the support you would want, and how you plan to use it.

Thanks for your help!

[QUOTE=xmas;21764]These URLs will most likely look like:
("task" will be either an action or project.)

omnifocus://{task,context,folder}/[id1],[optional-id2][/QUOTE]

Oh, it occurs to me that this notation uses a little programmer shorthand which might not be obvious to everyone. The stuff in braces denotes "choose one" options, so the three types of URLs we're describing here would actually look something like this:
[LIST=1][*]omnifocus:///task/j6a_IXfVPs1[*]omnifocus:///context/xy9234zx[*]omnifocus:///folder/uweog97a[/LIST]
(The other change I made in the above examples was to add an extra slash to those URLs, since the standard form for URLs is scheme://[B][optional-hostname][/B]/path. We're not going to pay attention to the hostname at the moment, but we do want to reserve that portion of the path to conform to the standard.)

One of the things I definitely want to see is the ability to refer to something by its name rather than its id, i.e. I want to be able to refer to "omnifocus:///context/Home" rather than "omnifocus:///context/xy9234zx".

One use case for Perspective URLs would be creating review checklists in OmniOutliner. I could include Perspective URLs in OO that would switch OF to the appropriate perspective. For example, my Morning Review includes looking at three different perspectives: Active Project Review, Urgent Actions, and Important Actions.

This sounds awesome - I would definitely like the ability to refer to items by name. I don't know how to get to the task id. It would be nice if you could ctrl-click a task (or context, or perspective) and have an item "copy url" -- in addition to the ability to drag-drop an item as a link (with the name showing).

[QUOTE=Jottce;21780]This sounds awesome - I would definitely like the ability to refer to items by name. I don't know how to get to the task id. It would be nice if you could ctrl-click a task (or context, or perspective) and have an item "copy url" -- in addition to the ability to drag-drop an item as a link (with the name showing).[/QUOTE]

Yes, we will provide a means for you to easily get the URL.

[QUOTE=Jottce;21780]This sounds awesome - I would definitely like the ability to refer to items by name. I don't know how to get to the task id. It would be nice if you could ctrl-click a task (or context, or perspective) and have an item "copy url" -- in addition to the ability to drag-drop an item as a link (with the name showing).[/QUOTE]

I would second this and add the ability to copy url for multi-selected items. Thanks.

You can start plying w/ URLs for projects/actions/folders/contexts now.

There are still a number of issues, but any feedback you have is welcome.

Drag or copy some Focus item to another app that is rich-text enabled to get a URL.

Task link in TextEdit gets me back to a view but does not highlight/identify the task. Also, the task list elements should be fully expanded.

Can you put that URL in the URL field in iCal for synced tasks?

clipping files?
 

I dragged a project to the desktop. I was hoping for a .webloc clipping that I could put in the Finder folder relevant to the project. I was disappointed to get a text clipping with the project name in it.