custom styles
 

[FONT=Book Antiqua][SIZE=4]From the OmniFocus help: "In order to avoid too much fiddling around, OmniFocus doesn't support styling individual items. Instead, you can style all items of a particular type."

I can decide for myself what is "too much fiddling around", thank you.

For example, in my to-do OmniOutliner file, I have different colors for personal and professional items, plus a color that serves as a flag. Those can be set by a single keypress -- that hardly qualifies as fiddling -- and make me more efficient because I can get some info at a glance.

It would be great to have that capability in context view in OmniFocus, to make it more visual. As it stands now, everything looks the same.
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[QUOTE=henri;37282]From the OmniFocus help: "In order to avoid too much fiddling around, OmniFocus doesn't support styling individual items. Instead, you can style all items of a particular type."

I can decide for myself what is "too much fiddling around", thank you.
[/QUOTE]

Actually, I appreciate that I can't fiddle with it. I think Omni made the right decision there. A large percentage of those who need GTD, need the INability to fiddle with appearance, or we'd be fiddling all day while the fires burned... er.... so to speak.

Sorry, it sounds like some shared personal (but not company) philosophy got mixed up in the help there.

The real reason we don't allow individual styles on rows is because there are already a confusing number of combined styles being applied to each row, and each time we add another style dimension (bold/italic/purple/strikethrough) it gets even harder to make sure none of the styles interfere with each other in a way which might make it easy to misunderstand what state an action is currently in. (We're trying to keep orthogonal states styled with orthogonal styles, and trying to make sure they're all presented consistently and readably.)

But it doesn't sound like you're necessarily needing to style individual rows; it sounds like you'd like the ability to create a new style and then apply it to some rows. We do have a little bit of orthogonal styling state left: we haven't touched background color (except to indicate inbox items), so perhaps there's room to allow some amount of customization there like you can do with the colorizing rules in Mail. Would that help?

(I should also mention that 1.1 provides better customization options for the built-in styles. But I know that doesn't address this particular request!)

[quote=Ken Case;37287]it doesn't sound like you're necessarily needing to style individual rows; it sounds like you'd like the ability to create a new style and then apply it to some rows. We do have a little bit of orthogonal styling state left: we haven't touched background color (except to indicate inbox items), so perhaps there's room to allow some amount of customization there like you can do with the colorizing rules in Mail. Would that help?[/quote]

Yes! That's exactly what I want! Especially if it were combined with the single keypress capability you offer in Outliner. Ideally, I could apply a background color to specific actions, or to projects and all their actions.

And if I could also sort by color (as I can in Mail.app), or even filter by color, it would make this a killer feature. Not only an orthogonal style, but also an orthogonal attribute, which would allow those who want that to use background color as a way to assign priority levels (or anything else you might want to filter / sort by). The flexibility of flags (in content) with much greater power.

Thanks in advance!

I am not sure this has been addressed, but it would be helpful to me as well to be able to set background color. (I understand from a coding perspective how the font color relates to function, and shouldn't really be touched except as a style preference applied to the app as a whole.)

I specifically was looking to be able to assign a background color per a specific context. I'll send in a feature request for this as well. Thanks!

I am going to send in the request as well. I'd still like the ability to have a context column when it doesn't appear sometimes, but I'd also like the ability to color code by context.

Mail's use of colors was a great example. Thanks.

I've used OmniOutliner Pro for a long time and downloaded OmniFocus today. The only disappointment so far with OF is the inability to format selected text.

Ken, adding the ability to customize the background color of individual items would go a long way. In fact, I use background color more than font styles to mark up OmniOutliner items. Like henri, all my styles in OmniOutliner simply require a single keypress, and they have become extremely important in my to-do lists.

Now that I've used OF for a while, I'm even more convinced I want to be able to apply background colors with a single keypress. That would solve so many problems with one feature!

I could use different background colors for the following things which currently cannot be expressed, and are in fact orthogonal to what can currently be expressed:

- "waiting for" actions -- something I can't act on until I hear from someone

- "not on weekend" actions -- things I'm willing to work on Mo-Fr, but not Sa-Su

- quick actions -- faster than entering something in the duration column, and it would save me from using that column

- on-hold actions

Other people could use this for their own needs. It's a one-stop substitute for colored flags or tags. It would be great as a visual aid, but it should also allow sorting and filtering.

OF is great, but it's rigid. This feature adds flexibility at no cost to those people who think OF is perfect as it is: they don't have to use it.

[QUOTE=henri;57406]This feature adds flexibility [b]at no cost[/b] to those people who think OF is perfect as it is: they don't have to use it.[/QUOTE]
(Emphasis mine) Sorry, but that is not usually true, no matter what feature you might be discussing. Time and effort spent implementing (and documenting and testing and localizing) feature <X> is time and effort not available for feature <Y>. The only cases that come to mind where it might be otherwise are when doing <X> eliminates the need for <Y>, or where some developer believes so strongly in the importance of <X> that they are willing to do it on their own time.

Good point!

I guess my argument is that this may be worth pursuing because it addresses several common requests at once. (To wit: "waiting for" actions, "on hold" actions, tagging, priorities, and because of this feature's flexibility, others I have not thought of.)