[Bruce Champ]

I'm having a weird problem with OmniFocus for the Mac. I enter an item, but when I go back to the window, the entry isn't there. I tried deleting the plist file, to no avail. I've been using OmniFocus since it was in beta. I pre-ordered OmniFocus before it actually came out. Does anyone have any suggestions/answers? Thanks in advance,
Bruce

[Eustace Tilley]

When you search for the item, do you find it?

[Bruce Champ]

Originally Posted by Eustace Tilley

When you search for the item, do you find it?

No, it doesn't find the entry. Does that give anyone a clue?

[whpalmer4]

Could you be a bit more specific about how you are entering the item, which window you are going back to, etc? You know, an exact set of instructions to reproduce the problem...pretend we can't see your keyboard, mouse or screen :-)

[Bruce Champ]

I'm currently writing a monograph. I enter "Finish Chapter 1" and set a starting date of +1d (Tomorrow), and set the topic to Monograph and an ending date of +1w. I then enter "Finish Chapter 2" and set the beginning date, category of Monograph. beginning, and eddying date. When I go back to the OmniFocus window, all my entries are gone. I tried deleting the plist file (after making a copy), to no avail. I'm perplexed by the whole thing. I've been using OmniFocus since it was in beta. I've never had any problem with the app before now. I'm hoping that someone can make a suggestion/advice.
Cheers,
Bruce Champ

[Brian]

Bruce, sorry for the confusion here! If you select the "All Items" option under the Perspectives menu and then search for the items in question, do they appear in the results?

(I'm wondering if you have the "Available" or "Next Action" filters active, and those actions are being hidden because they start tomorrow and/or aren't the next action in their project.)

Presumably you have already chosen

Perspectives > All Items

and made sure that the Inbox and Library trees were selected in the sidebar before running a search ?

(If you are using OF 1.8, which has now been released, you can run a simple search string script (below), or run the search:

tasks where <txt> is in name

in Where in OF, which will prompt you for the value of <txt>, and then warn you if any filter settings are hiding what you are looking for)

Simple search string script for OF 1.8:

tell application "OmniFocus"
	tell front document
		set strText to text returned of (display dialog "enter a search string" default answer "" buttons {"OK"} default button "OK")
		if strText is "" then return
		set lstTasks to name of (flattened tasks where name contains strText)
		if length of lstTasks > 0 then
			choose from list lstTasks
		else
			display dialog "Tasks containing " & strText & " not found" buttons {"OK"} default button "OK"
		end if
	end tell
end tell

[Bruce Champ]

Thanks. Choosing All Items did it! Guess I don't know as much about OmniFocus as I thought I did. It might have to do with the fact that I've had 2 strokes. Because of that and all the alcohol I've drunk over the years, my brain is pretty shot.

I wouldn't worry :-) The impression that data is missing from OF is reported rather frequently on these forums. There is an FAQ entry on it, but perhaps it could usefully be a little more foregrounded.

The burial of 'All items' in the Perspectives menu (wedged somewhere in the middle, and hardly leaping to the eye) is one of the things that suggest to me that the first phase of OF conceptualisation and design was very much preoccupied with *narrowing* focus, and eliminating distractions from the field of view. I'm hoping that OF 2 will give equal weight to *broadening* focus, and finding all the stuff that was temporarily hidden from view.

At the moment it's a bit like being offered an unusually good and sophisticated automatic transmission on the journey into narrowed focus, but having to learn the quirks of a rather basic manual transmission on the journey back home :-)

--

[Ken Case]

I think one problem is that many people double-click on things to start editing them, and don't realize that in OmniFocus they simply need to click—that double-clicking actually opens a new window which is focused on that item's project. And then, because OmniFocus remembers its open windows, you can quit and come back and you're still focused on a single project.

Our most recently designed interface, OmniFocus for iPad, is much more explicit about focusing and makes it a lot easier to unfocus when you're done (just click away). We've certainly learned a few lessons over the past few years and look forward to improving our Mac interface with some of those lessons!