[Chris]

I currently have my machine shutdown every evening, and restart in the morning. OmniFocus is one of my login items.

I want OF to restart with a particular perspective, called "Due Today". If I go to that perspective, quit OF and restart it, it restarts in that perspective. However, if I restart the machine, on auto-start on login, OF doesn't start in that perspective, it starts (for reasons I don't understand) focused on a particular project.

Is this behavior correct? Do other people see something similar? How can I coerce OF to auto-start with the perspective that I want?

This is with one of the current sneaky peeks, BTW.

[Craig]

Would it work to set the perspective file as the startup item instead of the application itself?
/Users/youraccount/Library/Application Support/OmniFocus/Perspectives/Due Today.ofocus-perspective

[Toadling]

It sounds like OmniFocus is starting in its Default View. If you go to Perspectives -> Revert to Default View, does OmniFocus show the same view you see when starting up (i.e. the one focused on a particular project)?

You can save the Default View by first doing the Perspectives -> Revert to Default View thing, then set things up as you like, and then quit OmniFocus. When you reopen the app, the Default View should be preserved as you last had it.

On my system, any perspective I had set when I quit OmniFocus is displayed again when I relaunch the app. Does that not work on your machine? Note that I don't have mine set to open automatically as a login item; I just launch OmniFocus manually and leave it running all the time.

-Dennis

[Chris]

I'm not at work today; I'll have to try these suggestions when I'm in again.

Toadling, it works like that when I quit and restart OF, the only time it doesn't work is when I restart the machine and OF starts up as a login item. (I haven't tried just logging out and logging back in to see what happens.)

[Toadling]

Originally Posted by Chris

Toadling, it works like that when I quit and restart OF, the only time it doesn't work is when I restart the machine and OF starts up as a login item. (I haven't tried just logging out and logging back in to see what happens.)

Hmm, that seems odd that the behavior would differ depending on how (more specifically, from where) the app was launched. To be absolutely clear, do you have the OmniFocus application or your OmniFocus database in your login items? Whichever you have in your login items, have you tried switching to the other to see what happens?

I would think launching the OmniFocus application itself, or an alias to it, would always produce the same result, regardless of how or where it was launched from (e.g. double-click in Finder, single-click in Dock, running "open /Applications/OmniFocus.app" in Terminal, activation from Quicksilver or LaunchBar or Spotlight, selection from the Finder's Recent Items menu, etc.).

-Dennis

[curt.clifton]

I think this may be a shut down problem, not a launching problem. It seems the OF (sometimes?) fails to remember the current view when it is shutdown by a system shutdown rather than quit manually.

[Chris]

That's a good theory, but if I do the sequence: set perspective, quit OF, restart OF, restart computer, then I get the right perspective on the first restart of OF, but not the second. So somehow restarting the computer isn't just making OF forget the current view, it's making it go back to some previous state prior to the state it used the previous time OF started up. (Hope that makes sense!) I don't understand where it's retrieving that information from.