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Essential feature missing Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
After using Omnifocus for a month, I have to say I am very happy with it. However there is one feature which I find very valuable missing on all platforms (Mac & iOS). When I go thru my different projects in project-view, there is no way for me to filter by context inside a project.

Let's say for example that I am using my Omnifocus on iPad. I am going thru various different projects and folders (in project-view) and I look at my Finance single-action list. I have there 50+ different tasks inside. Suddenly I want to see how many bills do I have inside this single-action list. There is no way for me to quickly now filter by context and select @bill - inside the project. I have only option to quickly alter the 'availability' option which I hardly ever change in the project-view.

To achieve what I want, I have to first exit project-view to context-view. Then find context @bill and then I get a list from tasks from all projects with the selected context. Also in Omnifocus desktop version you can change the 'sort by' to project to get a better looking list yet in iOS versions this is not possible.

So in the future releases of Omnifocus, I really hope that Omnigroup will add 'filter by context' option in project-view. I have already sent a feature request, I just wanted to to see how other users feel about this in this forum.

Last edited by devastat; 2011-04-15 at 12:58 PM..
 
There are a couple of ways to do this on the Mac.

One option would be to select the Finance project in the sidebar, then use the "Focus on Finance" command under the View menu. That gives you a window which hides all your other projects. Switch that window to context mode and select the @Bill context in the sidebar - that should show all (and only) the actions you're looking for.

Another approach doesn't give you as tightly focused a view of the tasks, but should also be useful in a more general-purpose capacity, which may be handy. That would be to set up a Context-mode Perspective that's grouped by project.

Then, when you needed to see some subset of your tasks, you could switch to that Perspective and select the context in the sidebar. That'll still show you all the actions in whichever context you're interested in, but they'll be organized in a way which should make it easy to identify the ones from the project you care about. (Another advantage: this approach would also work on your iPad, once you sync the Perspective over.)

Does that help? If there's part of your use case those don't cover, send feedback to the support ninjas and we can write up a feature request for you. Thanks!
 
Dear Brian,

Thanks a lot for your reply. I think that the method you suggested (of choosing the project from sidebar and then switch to context-mode) works well for the desktop version of Omnifocus, however the method where you create a project-related context-view perspective will not work on the iPad version as you cannot select the context that you are looking at inside a perspective (like with the sidebar in the desktop version). It would work if you just need to create such perspective for a project offcourse.

To make this work on any context, you would have to create a perspective for each context separately, transfer them all to iPad and then create such lists by choosing the perspective with the given context.

So I don't think there is any user-friendly way to achieve this on the iOS devices. The small eye-icon where you can choose the availability option on the project-view of the iPad version is very user friendly. I wish something like that could be developed for filtering by context as well.

Last edited by devastat; 2011-04-15 at 02:10 PM..
 
Oh, that's a good point - I forgot the Detail button doesn't exist for perspectives!

If you email us, we can file a feature request for adding something to the eye button. There's also a couple of search-related requests that might help here - folks have asked for the ability to enter context/project/folder names into the search field, and have also asked for the ability to restrict searches to the screen they're viewing, rather than do a global search.

If either of those would help you do this, wouldn't hurt to ask to be added to them, as well. Thanks!
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Brian View Post
folks have asked for the ability to enter context/project/folder names into the search field, and have also asked for the ability to restrict searches to the screen they're viewing, rather than do a global search.
And in the "grass is always greener on the other side of the fence" department, many Mac users, who already have this feature, want it to work more like the iPad :-)
 
 


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