[usertech]

There is a separate thread in this forum - "Omnifocus 2 Projects and Contexts need to be sortable" in which I attempt to argue the case for providing manual sorting of contexts (dragging them up and down) and if you have any doubt of its necessity, I suggest you read it first before adding to this one.

I have some suggestions for how the view bar (which allows you to automatically sort and filter - when I say 'automatically' I mean as opposed to dragging actions up and down which is what I mean by manual sorting). Of course the challenge when it comes to implementing manual sorting in Context Mode is how to allow manual sorting to exist when there are so many important automatic sorting and filtering options that are available and necessary and when those options change the actions that are visible and how they are sorted. My suggestion is that there be a togglable icon on the toolbar which switches between automatic and manual sorting. If it's set to automatic sorting then the settings of the view bar govern what is displayed. If however it is set to Manual sorting, the view bar sets the Context Filter to Remaining and locks its setting (visually dimming it), the Group and Sort popups should be locked, the Availability Filter should be locked, dimmed and set to Remaining, the Status Filter should be locked, dimmed and set to Any Status, and the Estimated Time Filter be locked to Any Duration. If these restrictions were not used manual sorting would cause chaos the second that any view bar setting was changed because the number of visible actions would be changing all the time.

Of course you then allow the automatic sorting options subsort by the manual sort order where appropriate and possible.

The task of manually sorting actions could be made easier by first automatically sorting them by some sort field (due date?).

Planning mode could have the same automatic and manual sort toggle although it would enable manual sorting of actions not projects (the current functionality).

While we are talking design and sorting an additional popup should be added enabling actions within projects to be subsorted (the primary sort being of the projects as a whole).

I think that there needs to be automatic subsorting of context actions too and I would add a second subsorting popup and place it below not to the right of the existing sort popup on the toolbar.

I don't think that the number of popups on the toolbar cause Omnifocus to be hard to understand. What makes it hard to understand in Context mode is why there are so many popups currently and yet I cannot get my list of actions into the order I want. That having been said, why not omit the Flagged popup and the Duration popup from the toolbar unless you enable them in preferences (won't less people use Flagged if there is manual sorting?)