Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4
Have you watched the screencasts that Omni has provided on the OmniFocus product page? It sounds a bit like you're trying to learn the program just by experimentation, and that isn't necessarily the optimal way.
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Yes, I did (well, not all of them but at least some that showed many of these "oddities" - otherwise I probably wouldn't have found out about them). As I mentioned in my original post: A lot of those standards are just something that works across all applications I'm using, so only OmniFocus breaks it - which is unfortunate because the way OmniFocus usually is used makes it the last kind of application that should work "significantly differently" from all the other apps I use.
The point of those conventions is that you don't even have to learn any of the basic operations of a new application at all - all you need to learn are the specifics of the application (like "there's projects, and contexts, and actions").
That said: I fully understand that many of the things a new user might find a bit weird are things that existing users that got used to it may not want to live without, which is why I suggested keeping the old style (or at least parts of it) as an option. Btw, it's also the reason why I posted this to the forum in addition to filing a feature request via mail.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bill Van Hecke
But one of our main priorities for the next round of major revisions to all of our apps is to reconsider, stabilize, and standardize the way our basic mouse and keyboard interactions work. We've already started moving in that direction by, for instance, making Enter confirm editing without creating a new row, so that you can use that instead of Escape. Ultimately, we may end up adopting the OmniPlan way across the board, where pressing Return confirms your edit, and then pressing it again creates a new item. Of course, we hope to also provide a reasonable set of preferences for matching the way you are used to working.
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That sounds like the perfect approach to me - thank you for going in that direction (well, I guess I should probably have a look at OmniPlan first - but I trust you ;-) ). And: I *do* believe that there is a significant number of historical, practical, and technical factors that have led to the interactions you have now (I also know projects with source code that tells such stories) ;-)
Btw, from my perspective, the UI doesn't look "random" - it does actually look like someone did spend some time thinking about it; it's just that these "well thought out custom solutions" are especially confusing in an application that I jump in and out of while using a lot of other applications. And, in some cases, it looks a bit like the wheel was re-invented ;-)