Filters and Organizers
 

First of all, let me say that I have been really enjoying the alpha version that I have been probing for the last couple of days. It is really beautifully realized, and very promising. I say this not to tweak those who don't have theirs yet, but to recognize the hard work of the crew at Omni.
I was just playing with the filters, and came up with two philosophical questions.
First: Grouping and sorting are not really filters. Should they be where they are? Should they be organized differently for clarity? A filter should potentially change the number of items you see, while an organizer will change the order and shrubbery. I don't pretend to have a great answer to this, but perhaps the comments could be illuminating. At the moment, I lean towards keeping them together, as they are likely to be used at the same time, but reorganizing the filter bar to separate the types of functions.
Wouldn't it be nice to have the ability to save filter/organizer sets? Beyond beta, though.
Second: When a filter activates, there is a question about how deep into a project it should drill. For example, I tried flagging an item in a sub-project, hiding the item by collapsing the subproject, then filtering for flagged items. Nothing came up. On further investigation, I found the notes about flagged item searching not working yet (this it still alpha!), so I suspect that as the cause. For now, based on what I see with the text search, I will assume that fully-implemented filters will apply to all data, whether it began visible or not. That's what I expect, but there may be others who expect something else.
I am still playing with this; when the kGTD converter brings over all the links, I will get more serious. It is really nice work, though!.
Thank you-

I think the current interface is pretty clear, regardless of the different 'powers' of organizers and filters. You're still dealing with data in it's non-default representation. iGTD (which I'm still using, until recurrent tasks show up in OF) has a toggle for 'natural order', which I like for en/disabling organizers and filters.

[QUOTE=Blatchara]Grouping and sorting are not really filters. Should they be where they are? Should they be organized differently for clarity? A filter should potentially change the number of items you see, while an organizer will change the order and shrubbery. I don't pretend to have a great answer to this, but perhaps the comments could be illuminating. At the moment, I lean towards keeping them together, as they are likely to be used at the same time, but reorganizing the filter bar to separate the types of functions.
Wouldn't it be nice to have the ability to save filter/organizer sets? Beyond beta, though.[/QUOTE]
These are both great approaches - keeping the organizing and filters on same line, but shade the backgrounds different to indicate different functions;

and save the sets.

[QUOTE=joelande]These are both great approaches - keeping the organizing and filters on same line, but shade the backgrounds different to indicate different functions;

and save the sets.[/QUOTE]

I was going to suggest this - I really like the idea of slight delineation in color or shading but no other changes - the interface is really beautiful as is.

Saving sets could (and I'd argue probably should) be done by adding a smart folder function which would be pretty sweet.