Startup Perspective
 

I currently have my machine shutdown every evening, and restart in the morning. OmniFocus is one of my login items.

I want OF to restart with a particular perspective, called "Due Today". If I go to that perspective, quit OF and restart it, it restarts in that perspective. However, if I restart the machine, on auto-start on login, OF doesn't start in that perspective, it starts (for reasons I don't understand) focused on a particular project.

Is this behavior correct? Do other people see something similar? How can I coerce OF to auto-start with the perspective that I want?

This is with one of the current sneaky peeks, BTW.

Would it work to set the perspective file as the startup item instead of the application itself?
/Users/youraccount/Library/Application Support/OmniFocus/Perspectives/Due Today.ofocus-perspective

It sounds like OmniFocus is starting in its Default View. If you go to Perspectives -> Revert to Default View, does OmniFocus show the same view you see when starting up (i.e. the one focused on a particular project)?

You can save the Default View by first doing the Perspectives -> Revert to Default View thing, then set things up as you like, and then quit OmniFocus. When you reopen the app, the Default View should be preserved as you last had it.

On my system, any perspective I had set when I quit OmniFocus is displayed again when I relaunch the app. Does that not work on your machine? Note that I don't have mine set to open automatically as a login item; I just launch OmniFocus manually and leave it running all the time.

-Dennis

I'm not at work today; I'll have to try these suggestions when I'm in again.

Toadling, it works like that when I quit and restart OF, the only time it doesn't work is when I restart the machine and OF starts up as a login item. (I haven't tried just logging out and logging back in to see what happens.)

[QUOTE=Chris;44744]Toadling, it works like that when I quit and restart OF, the only time it doesn't work is when I restart the machine and OF starts up as a login item. (I haven't tried just logging out and logging back in to see what happens.)[/QUOTE]

Hmm, that seems odd that the behavior would differ depending on how (more specifically, from where) the app was launched. To be absolutely clear, do you have the OmniFocus application or your OmniFocus database in your login items? Whichever you have in your login items, have you tried switching to the other to see what happens?

I would think launching the OmniFocus application itself, or an alias to it, would always produce the same result, regardless of how or where it was launched from (e.g. double-click in Finder, single-click in Dock, running "open /Applications/OmniFocus.app" in Terminal, activation from Quicksilver or LaunchBar or Spotlight, selection from the Finder's Recent Items menu, etc.).

-Dennis

I think this may be a shut down problem, not a launching problem. It seems the OF (sometimes?) fails to remember the current view when it is shutdown by a system shutdown rather than quit manually.

That's a good theory, but if I do the sequence: set perspective, quit OF, restart OF, restart computer, then I get the right perspective on the first restart of OF, but not the second. So somehow restarting the computer isn't just making OF forget the current view, it's making it go back to some previous state prior to the state it used the previous time OF started up. (Hope that makes sense!) I don't understand where it's retrieving that information from.

Chris: what happens if you take OmniFocus off the login items, set the perspective, quit OmniFocus, log out and back in, and manually launch OmniFocus?

We used to have a bug where OmniFocus didn't open the database at all if it was launching on login, so maybe this is a reincarnation of that.

I'm getting something similar to this, but not with OF starting on log-in.

If I close OF, then start it again from the dock, it's fine, but if it needs to re-load the database as part of a sync (it does this rather a lot - even when nothing's changed remotely?), it starts with a re-sized window, focussing on a particular project. I rarely use "focus", so I don't know what's going on.

Is it possible the synced file from the iPhone includes some "last viewed" info that's confusing OF?

Mark

[QUOTE=Lizard;44787]Chris: what happens if you take OmniFocus off the login items, set the perspective, quit OmniFocus, log out and back in, and manually launch OmniFocus?[/QUOTE]

OK, back in the office after a couple days off.

When I do this, OF opens correctly in the perspective I want.

When I then make it a startup item again, it doesn't.

I notice that it opens in a "Focusing on ..." mode. I wonder if that has something to do with this?

[QUOTE]It sounds like OmniFocus is starting in its Default View. If you go to Perspectives -> Revert to Default View, does OmniFocus show the same view you see when starting up (i.e. the one focused on a particular project)?[/QUOTE]

No, unfortunately, that's not it.

Still looking for suggestions on how to fix this.