[Toadling]

Originally Posted by mloiterman

I think OF needs to rethink this feature.

By "OF", I suspect you mean "the Omni Group". OmniFocus is a wonderful piece of software, but I don't think it put much thought into developing itself. :-)

As for "rethink[ing] this feature", that's exactly what's happening in the sneaky peek process right now! Neither the feature nor the 1.8 release have shipped. Be glad that you get to have an active role in shaping the outcome by trying out the sneaky peek builds with an open mind and a willingness to provide constructive feedback. There aren't many development shops that give the consumers this much input into the process!

Originally Posted by mloiterman

The blocking feature is also confusing. For example, none of my projects or action groups are adopting the style I have set for Projects or Action groups. Rather, they've all adopted the style for Blocked. I don't understand why or how to unblock them.

Actually, it's not really confusing at all. It's just a slight change in behavior.

**For this discussion, projects and action groups behave the same way, so let's collectively refer to them as "parents".

You probably wouldn't consider a parent complete until all of its actions are completed, right? So OmniFocus treats parents as blocked if they have any incomplete actions (and parents are styled accordingly).

If you set your Availability Filter in context mode to "Available", parents will be hidden from view because they are blocked, unless all their actions are completed, in which case the parent is no longer blocked.

Pretty logical and straightforward, I think. It should have worked this way all along in my view. :-)

Where the confusion comes in is how should OmniFocus sort parents in context view, which is designed to display items by context? Traditionally, parents don't have contexts, only actions do.

Parents do have a "default context" field (and have had it for quite some time now), so the simple solution was to categorize parents by the value of this already existing field.

Many people weren't using the parents' default context field, though, so now many parents are showing up in the "No Context" bin in context mode.

One proposed solution has been to simply assign some kind of "review" context to your parents to keep them out of the "No Context" bin. Another is for the Omni Group to add some kind of "Parents" bin to the context mode sidebar (actions without contexts go in the "No Context" bin, parents without contexts go in the "Parents" bin).

Whether any of these are acceptable solutions and how they might be improved is still being debated.

-Dennis