View Single Post
It's taken a while, but OmniFocus has become essential to my life. The Mac version lets me (encourages me, even) to break my projects down into do-able chunks. A typical small-scale promo film for me looks like this (I've simplified it a little, but apologies for the size of this image):



Nesting actions is essential, and contexts keep things manageable. Being able to have action-groups run sequentially or parallel regardless of its parent's mode is part of what makes OmniFocus work so well.

This relatively simple project took me about 15 minutes to rattle out, a couple of weeks ago. It would take ages to create on the iPad though, because the UI is all based around dialog boxes rather than just letting me type the damn stuff in. And why in God's name do I have to use a dialog box to move items?

A fellow OF user said it's because my projects are too complicated, but he can't be right, can he? The Mac version encourages meaningfully structured projects, while the iPad version seems to be more about shopping lists or flat to-do lists.

I can understand why the iPhone version is so tunnel-visiony (although a more outliner-like view would certainly be possible - my project above is impossible to review on the iPhone). The iPad version feels like I'm trying to walk through molasses. Everything is done in dialog boxes, dialog boxes, dialog boxes. Look at Numbers on the iPad - Apple could have popped up dialog boxes to let you add rows and columns, but instead they let you just drag them into existence with your finger. That's what the iPad's supposed to be about!

I'm really torn. I love Omni - and the remarkably bright and generous users on this forum - but I wonder why I have all these deep-set usability issues with their mobile apps when everyone else seems to be buzzing along fine.

Help!

(Oh yeah, the film outlined above is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VSfLKpPSYTc&hd=1 . I honestly couldn't do projects like this on my own if it weren't for OmniFocus, but half my life is spent away from the Mac...

Last edited by howiem; 2010-07-31 at 09:21 AM..