One of the most-requested features for the iOS editions of OmniFocus is a way to process information from other apps into OmniFocus action items. (Email, for example.)
One option is to use applications that support the
Send to OmniFocus feature, but what if you're using an app that doesn't support it, like the built-in Mail app on your iPhone?
(If you're interested in apps that do support the feature, check
this thread.)
Starting today, if you can turn the information into an email, you can add it to your OmniFocus inbox. Send an email from your PC, then tap a link on your iPhone to add that email to your database.
To try out the feature, send a message to
send-to-omnifocus@omnigroup.com. Within a few seconds, you'll receive an auto-response from us which includes a "Send to OmniFocus" link.
When you get back to your OmniFocus device of choice, open that mail message and tap or click either "Send to OmniFocus" link. At that point, OmniFocus will launch on your device and add the the subject and text of the original email to your database. (Attachments don't go along for the ride, but that also means that your sync times stay fast.)
(Note that this works best if you use a dedicated mail application - Mail for OS X/iPhone/iPad - as opposed to viewing your mail inside a browser. Web browsers don't seem to handle the custom link type as well as the native apps do, and Gmail blocks non-http URLs.)
We'll probably do more work in this area for future versions of OmniFocus and/or the
Omni Sync Server; this was just a quick/easy way we could improve the experience for folks that do a lot of work on non-Apple platforms. Hope it helps, and as always, we'd love to hear your feedback.
Update on 3/2/2012:
- Fixed truncated URL via first link;
- We now encode the HTML portion to better support all languages.
Update on 12/3/2012:
Closing this thread, as we're rolling out a new Omni Sync Server feature that's a significant improvement over this method. See
this thread for more info.