UI Suggestion: Headers, Views, and Sorting
 

It's not clear to me why the column headers disappear when the view bar is hidden.

Also, the sort utility seems a bit out of place in the view bar since all the other items are filters. Perhaps a better way would be to implement sorting by clicking on the column headers. Not only would that be a bit more of a standard approach, but it would allow for sort direction to be toggled (like Finder windows in list mode). Ideally, the user would be able to specify which columns appear in the view and drag them to arrange their order.

Like the sort-by lozenge, the group-by lozenge is also not a filter. Once upon a time the View Bar was called the Filter bar, but the presence of these two choices led to a name change. Also, note that the sort lozenge allows sorting by data that is not visible in columns. (That said, I too wish that the column headings supported click-to-sort.)

[QUOTE=curt.clifton;27163]Like the sort-by lozenge, the group-by lozenge is also not a filter.[/QUOTE]

Hmm, I didn't know that. Actually, I'm not even sure which one the "group-by" is. I supposed one could take that as evidence that the functionality of the view bar could be implemented more clearly.

-Steve

left to right on the view bar we have

- Group by
- Sort by
- Limit Actions to
- Limit Durations to (this time or less)
- Show by flagged

These are my names, not Omni's.

[QUOTE=jasong;27187]left to right on the view bar we have

- Group by
- Sort by
- Limit Actions to
- Limit Durations to (this time or less)
- Show by flagged

These are my names, not Omni's.[/QUOTE]

Thanks, that's helpful.

-Steve

Would a mouseover help here? I mean, would it be helpful if mousing over the group-by menu popped-up a tooltip saying something like "Grouped by due date"? I know some people don't like tooltips but I reckon there's a place for them here and elsewhere in OmniFocus. (There could be a preference for showing tooltips).

[QUOTE=coconino;27208]Would a mouseover help here? I mean, would it be helpful if mousing over the group-by menu popped-up a tooltip saying something like "Grouped by due date"? I know some people don't like tooltips but I reckon there's a place for them here and elsewhere in OmniFocus. (There could be a preference for showing tooltips).[/QUOTE]

I think that would be helpful.

[QUOTE=coconino;27208](There could be a preference for showing tooltips).[/QUOTE]

I've often wondered why help tags couldn't be implemented such that they appear only when a modifier key is held down during mouse over. That way, they wouldn't be "in your way" when you don't need them (90+% of the time); but for those occasions when the function of a UI element needs some clarification, you could just hold down the option key (or whatever) during mouse over to get a brief description. This would also allow the help tags to be longer/more descriptive since they wouldn't be popping up in your face every time your mouse pointer happened to come to rest on a UI element. I think you'd still want that slight delay (the duration of which could perhaps be configurable) so that they wouldn't interfere with the modifier key being pressed as part of a key combination.

-Steve