My beef with the View Bar
 

OK, Omni has done a stellar job with some VERY hard UI design challenges. The nature of this program leads to many tough choices on the flexibility vs. Ease of Use tradeoff.

Something has always bugged me about the view bar. I've been using software of many types for many years. The view bar always felt like a guessing game as to what I should expect when I first started using it. Its consistent, and I've learned to use it over time, but I finally am able to put my finger on what may bug me the most:

It is never clear whether the choice is going to act at the level of the project or the task.

This is primarily a gripe in planning mode.

You can sort tasks by due date in the context view, but in planning view it sorts only the projects (and not the tasks).

In context mode, all losenges refer to their effect on tasks. In planning mode, some apply to tasks, some apply to projects. But there is nothing in the UI that tells you what to expect - thats bad. The approach is an admirable start - and I'm not exactly sure how to fix it.

My own first thought would be to have a "+" sign over by where the X is on the right of the view bar. Clicking on this would drop down a second row of losenges that acted on the tasks in planning view. I'd put all the losenges that apply to tasks on this row, and also add another sort losenge so that you could sort projects one way, and then tasks within a project another way. You could have a flag for each, and you could even have an estimate losenge on each row, where for the project row, it would use the sum of all the tasks.

This approach has its own problems I'm sure, and like I said these are very challenging UI issues.


There is also no quick keyboard navigation of the view bar (though I have suggested one [url]http://forums.omnigroup.com/showpost.php?p=27322&postcount=1[/url])

Are you all perfectly happy with the view bar, how do you think it can be improved.