Before the arrival of OmniFocus, I maintained my task lists in OmniOutliner Pro, which was my main use of the latter application. It was a great relief to move task management to OmniFocus. A side-effect was not using OmniOutliner on a regular basis.
I recently created a new OmniOutliner document that I'm updating several times a day, every day. Now that I'm constantly switching back-n-forth between OF and OO, I find I'm making mistakes, mostly in OO, and mostly due to my fingers automatically using OF keyboard shortcuts when I'm in OO. For example,
- OF: Return in middle of task name = create a new blank task below the current task
- OO: Return in the middle of a text field = truncate the current line & put the rest of the line (including columns) on a new line
- OF: Return at the end of a date field = commit the date
- OO: Return at the end of a date field = commit the date and open a new line
- OF: Delete at the beginning of a new blank task = delete the task
- OO: Delete at the beginning of a new blank line = select the last field of the previous line, leaving the blank line
That's just the beginning. My hope is that an Omni Group developer will take on the task of identifying and reconciling the differences between OmniFocus and OmniOutliner.
The dilemma with any reconciliation is that the behavior of one or both applications will change, resulting in push-back from current users. This might be minimized with Keyboard preferences in each application; OmniOutliner already has a start on this.
When the keyboard differences are resolved, then there's the behavior of dragging URLs and Email messages into existing and new entries.
[submitted as formal feedback]