[IceWind]

CarbonFin Outliner manages to handle Drag & Drop, Indent/Outdent very well indeed.

http://carbonfin.com/

I can create large, complex outlines with 50+ entries in a matter of minutes. Yes it also lets you hit Return on ipad keyboard and you get a new line under your last entry (at the same level of indent... exactly like OF for Mac). I can drag and drop entries from any level of indentation to any other level.

If Omni implemented similar functionality in their iPad OF... it would be a hell of a lot better IMO.

They should ditch the god-awful UI setup they have right now and think along the lines of CarbonFin.

Yeah, I know its an outliener and not a GTD client, but GTD clients should have outliner functionality at their core. As it is... OF for iPad is pretty much useless.

EDIT: Come to think of it.. Omni are supposed to be working on OmniOutliner for iPad yeah? Hell... they could have combined effort of the outliner code and used the same functionality in both their Outliner and OF.. reducing dev costs and dev time, while providing a unified, coherent UI to their loyal fan base.

[blewis]

I see Carbonfin's sidebar has an edit button. Do you have to hit edit to move items in the sidebar?

[IceWind]

Originally Posted by blewis

I see Carbonfin's sidebar has an edit button. Do you have to hit edit to move items in the sidebar?

If you look up at the top of the main view (on right) there is a cross icon with 4-way arrows. Hit that and it puts you onto drag & drop mode to re-organise your outline. The drag and drop function still just lets you drag up and down in that view, but if I drop my currently grabbed entry into a new position that indented by 3 levels for example, it will drop it in there no problem. Omni could easily have implemented this same functionality. I have submitted a feature request to the ninjas.

In addition, when creating the outline... its a simple matter of hitting return on iPad keyboard to get a sibling entry. if you need to create a child, simply hit the icon at top which looks like a diagonal arrow (down to right) with a + sign. Doing this creates a new child by creating a new entry below your current entry and indented by one.

[Eye_Doc]

I agree, if perhaps not so vociferously.

They really need to get this done a little more elegantly, especially considering we are expecting OmniOutliner on the iPad.

Perhaps a customised keyboard with indent/exdent buttons.

Personally on the desktop, I just use the keyboard for this.

[howiem]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

Tell me, how much do I use OmniGraffle, hmm...? :)

OK, you got me, I have no idea how much you use OG :) I suppose what I meant was that OmniGraffle tends to be the task itself, rather than being something you're referring to and tweaking all day, every day.

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

One issue with putting the disclosure triangles and completion boxes on the left vs. the right is that putting them on the right puts them in the same place no matter the indentation level. While it seems like I should be able to tap an arbitrary spot on the screen just as easily as going there with mouse or trackpad, my experience on the iPad is that I'm faster if the boxes are always in the same spot.

Fair point; muscle memory is one of the keys to speed. It's the fact that putting the disclosure triangles on the right limits that expand/collapse functionality to projects and folders -- we're never, it seems, going to be able to expand/collapse action groups.

The big difference between the way you and I use OF seems [to me - just guessing here!] to be that you have many flatter projects, and I have fewer projects but with more complex structure and hierarchy inside them.

Seems that Omni expect us to work more like you than like me. But it's a step away from what they've given us on the Mac, where outlining seems like the core organisation concept.

If I didn't need the contexts and next-action functionality from OF, I'd be better suited to a vanilla outliner.

[endoftheQ]

Originally Posted by IceWind

As it is... OF for iPad is pretty much useless.

IceWind, thanks for posting about Outliner by CarbonFin, I downloaded copies both to my iPhone and iPad and...

... Outliner's drag-and-drop is exactly what I had hoped for and expected to get with OmniFocus for iPad, instead of which I get 'move' which relies on an 'experimental' feature (landscape mode) which another respected Member of this Board informs me remains experimental because it's full of bugs! Outliner has the ability to share, OPML, access via a web browser and a clean, legible, consistent GUI.

Oh, and it costs less than a tenth of OmniFocus for iPad.

In my eyes, it demonstrates how outdated, shoddy, inconsistent and overpriced the OmniFocus family of products have sadly become.

[howiem]

Yup - CarbonFin outliner is pretty damn good. It's simple, fast, intuitive... but it's a much simpler animal than OmniFocus, and doesn't fulfil the needs of those of us trying to do things the GTD way.

I wish Omni had started by developing OmniOutliner for iPad - get the outlining UI stuff sussed! - and then developed OmniFocus from that basis, rather than apparently starting with OF for iPhone, and fudging a rude outliner UI around it.

Of course, a week ago I was more than happy that they were tackling OF first, but that was before I tried using it :)

Damn, I'm demanding.

Originally Posted by endoftheQ

In my eyes, it demonstrates how outdated, shoddy, inconsistent and overpriced the OmniFocus family of products have sadly become.

Can't say I agree with this; much as I feel Omni made a strategic error in deciding which iPad UI/app to develop first, I don't think anyone else has got a perfect GTD solution yet. This iPad version, much as I hate it, isn't the worst I've tried, and Omni's history suggests they'll refine it until it's good.

Gotta stay on the forums and argue for what you need, though :)

[endoftheQ]

Howiem, don't get me wrong, I've been an OmniFanBoy since I got the first releases of OmniOutliner and OmniGraffle shipped over from the States, that being BI (before internet!).

Originally Posted by howiem

Yup - CarbonFin outliner is pretty damn good. It's simple, fast, intuitive... but it's a much simpler animal than OmniFocus, and doesn't fulfil the needs of those of us trying to do things the GTD way.

Apologies if I implied that CarbonFin Outliner was a replacement for OmniFocus, I was simply observing that this is how I think the OF GUI on the iPad should have been implemented.

IMHO I foresee OmniFocus evolving into a niche product for fundamentalist GTD'ers (although, as I've previously stated and having read DA's book, the purists seem to be in no hurry to ditch their computers and return to pen & paper!) but us neo-GTD'ers want something more.

Originally Posted by howiem

Gotta stay on the forums and argue for what you need, though :)

I actually can't see the point, anymore. It doesn't really seem to make any difference. The only time I've had any success has been where I had a legal threat backing me, and that could have just been coincidence, although the feature was fixed in the next release, after almost a year of other Members requesting it on the Board.

However, I'm always truly impressed by the level of support offered by Omni and remain in awe of the generosity of Members in giving so freely of their time and experience.

In the last week or so, FileMaker Go has been released and (admittedly under pressure from colleagues) I've been testing it and have been blown away with how fantastic it is (my expectations were based on Bento!). I've agreed that in the next month we will use a standard GTD FileMaker template and test out a large project. If it's successful, we'll hire a developer for a few weeks to tweak the template to give us any additional features we need.

With the release of, what I consider, a deeply flawed OmniFocus for iPad, I honestly can't find it in myself to defend OF to my team again in the hope that Omni will eventually refine OF into something good. Sorry. :(

[wlow]

I, too, am disappointed by the Move implementation. Sorting is a basic feature of any GTD organizer and in Omnifocus for iPad it's just painful. It should be too hard to have at least a Bookmark-type sorting, you know? Click Edit and start moving things around. As it stands you have to drill down on each item to get the Move command. Ugh.

[BK0001]

Originally Posted by endoftheQ

CarbonFin Outliner's drag-and-drop is exactly what I had hoped for and expected to get with OmniFocus for iPad, instead of which I get 'move' which relies on an 'experimental' feature (landscape mode) which another respected Member of this Board informs me remains experimental because it's full of bugs! Outliner has the ability to share, OPML, access via a web browser and a clean, legible, consistent GUI.

I really do wish OmniFocus rises to the occasion. It's perhaps OK that they they don't have the wherewithall to invent a UI that redefines best in class on the iPad - so long as they have the ability to recognize where they can improve, and to be fast followers and adopt best in class solutions that other companies introduce.

The concern, as is evident on the Mac version, is that once a UI is defined, Omni seems to stick with it for a very long time.