OmniFocus 4

I have always upgraded to the latest Omni Focus and they never disappointed in the past but OMNI FOCUS 4 is a glitchy, slow, UI nightmare. I am VERY DISAPPOINTED. The most basic operations like adding a task task the iOS. Push a button and wait for it to respond. Sometimes you have to click on it multiple times. Everything is a bit glitchy. Dragging a task to a new day used to be a smooth drag. Now it hesitates. The UI has been updated to be slower to get where you want to go. Now to take a task and assign it to tomorrow requires you to go into sub menus. More clicks to do everything. Bad UI choices. Not to mention the huge individual task panel that opens every time you make a task. You can no longer just make a list of tasks by hitting enter and getting a new task line without the big task panel. Now you have to close the task panel. Oh and there is no more SAVE PLUS NEW TASK button. I don’t know what they were thinking on this new version but I am thinking that I need to go back to version 3 or just give up on Omni Focus all together. It’s a shame because it is a very expensive app. Any app that costs over $70 should work and should get better each time you upgrade. Version 4 is a travesty. There are a few good things in the UI update. But the vast majority of the UI updates make it slower to get things in and move them around. I do like the updates to the Perspectives. That was a good update. But it’s hard to be excited about one good feature update when you are plagued by glitches and slow operation and bad UI.

It has the planning hierarchies and matrices you’ve come to expect from Omni, but the programming is clunky and lacks sufficient UX direction. For example, adding a task/action flows downward, which makes sense for cascading lists that toggle. The experience gets confused when adding sub-tasks. It flows downward to start, but if your cursor was previously on the dominant task, each new sub task will push any previously created sub-tasks down in the queue, which will force you to reorganize everything manually if you were expecting a standard hierarchical list. If your cursor was on the previously created sub-task, the next created sub-task will be placed above the previous sub-task. When you finish engaging with the sub-task and move on, your list of subtasks often get re-arranged seemingly randomly. Another problem is the varying representation of folders. I embrace the enjoyment of customization, but not at the expense of function. Nesting folders holds an importance when dealing with tiered, multi-variable projects. Leaving folders out of views leaves the pathway inarticulate, which muddies a user pathway, especially when sufficient complexity is achieved. This application has the information visualization components in place, but without effective user interaction to help impart the value of using it, there isn’t much function—despite the potential value of the depth it could provide.

So I had massive freezing and crashing problems with this initially. I think it requires more free space on your iPhone. Cleared that up and deleted completed projects and that helped. I still find the layout confusing and have spent too much time trying to figure it out…still haven’t quite…yet even with the tutorial and not sure how to get the plugins to work on iPhone…. All that said…feels like it has potential… Update: Nope still freezing like crazy back to 1 star….it always starts out fully expanded and that crashes my app because I have so many projects. Please let me go back to Omni3. Update still crashing despite uninstalling and reinstalling and having 10GB free space Update again: their update seems to have fixed the major freezing issues. Back up to 4 stars.