View Single Post
Note: Kaijin's post below includes a great explanation of how the controls in the revamped Perspectives window works. Thanks very much! Click here to jump to it.

As OmniFocus has evolved we've added quite a few new features, and we've done a lot of work on Perspectives. At their core, Perspectives are supposed to make it easy for you to use/access your OmniFocus data in the way that you want to, whether that's adding new actions in the Inbox, planning and organizing your projects in Project mode, working in a context based method in Context mode, seeing your due and overdue actions, or doing a review of your work.

Initially we didn't add any perspectives by default, and it was a little intimidating to get to the different areas in OmniFocus. (For instance, setting up a Review perspective was a lengthy process that required far too much advanced knowledge) We added in some "Built-in" perspectives to address this in 1.5, and we've now revamped those for 1.7.

The problem was that the built-in perspectives behaved very differently from the perspectives users could make.

What we want to do in 1.7 (and we're not quite there yet, which is why we value your input on this matter) is let you define your Perspectives in such a way that they'll do as much, or as little as you want.

Here is a breakdown of the saved information for perspectives in 1.7:

Always Applied
View State (Project or Context)
View Bar Settings (Sidebar Filter, Action Filters, Grouping, Sorting, Flagged)

Optionally Applied
Selection (buggy in some cases right now)
Expansion (might also be buggy)
Columns
Focus
View Bar settings from a Perspective of the other view mode

Only applied when holding down OPTION to open a new window
Size
Position
Sidebar State (this might be buggy)

Not Currently Saved
View Bar visibility
Toolbar visibility


The thinking behind all of this is that your perspectives should be predictable, configurable, and not get in your way.

If you want to just change the Focus and Filters, you should be able to do so, without reverting to some random position on the screen that you maybe didn't mean to save.

However, we weren't happy with some of the inconsistencies in the interface as a result of being "in" a perspective. Which is why anytime your view bar settings deviate from the default they turn a color, and why when you change any of those settings you're no longer "in" a perspective. We found this was confusing, as there wasn't a good way to clearly indicate why things would be blue sometimes and not others, and the only way to show that you were "in" a perspective was to look at the title bar (unless you happened to have the toolbar button on your toolbar).

We welcome your feedback as we continue work on this feature to make it as useful as possible to you, so please feel free to post here and let us know.

P.S. We'll likely be adding in a way to access the saved size, position and sidebar state, since that seems to be a pretty frequent request already.

Last edited by Brian; 2009-08-31 at 01:20 PM.. Reason: add link to Kaijin's post