Omnifocus Web
Omnifocus Web
The OmniFocus Web Add-On Subscriptions exist for customers who already own a standalone app, but wish to add web access. ⚠️ An existing license for OmniFocus for Mac or iOS is required for the Web app to work. Monthly Payment $4.99 USD $59.88 USD /yr. Web application. On January 26, 2018, Ken Case, CEO of the Omni Group, announced in the Omni Group forums that OmniFocus for the web is under development. It will not be a standalone version; it will only sync with existing databases set up with the macOS or iOS versions of OmniFocus. A subscription fee will be charged for access.
Earlier today, Omni Group CEO, Ken Case provided an update to the roadmap that he shared back in January.
As Ken noted, there has been a lot of change in the world since his January post. As a result of the pandemic, the Omni team transitioned from working in-person at their beautiful office in Seattle to working from home. Announcements at Apple’s WWDC (World Wide Developers Conference) will also have a significant impact on Omni’s products. Upcoming changes to Mac hardware and macOS are especially significant.
Below are some key takeaways from Ken’s post that will be of particular interest to OmniFocus users. I recommend reading the full post if you’d like to take a deeper dive into the specifics.
The Year to Date
Omni has taken significant strides so far this year. Some of this work has been behind the scenes, paving the way for new functionality to be introduced later in the year. Omni has also introduced some brand new features.
- Omni Automation – This cross-platform technology is now available in all of Omni’s apps, including OmniFocus. As I mentioned in a recent post, we’re hard at work creating content to help you get the most out of this ground-breaking technology.
- Floating Time Zones – It’s now possible to specify whether or not you want dates and times to automatically adjust as you travel between time zones. We shared a summary of this feature when it was introduced earlier this year and produced a tutorial (Membership required) to help you put it to good use during your future travels.
Looking Forward
There’s still plenty to come, including:
- OmniFocus for the Web: Custom Perspectives – Just over a year ago, Omni launched OmniFocus for the Web, making it possible for people to access their OmniFocus database from a desktop browser. The web platform will be taking a big leap forward with the introduction of Custom Perspectives. You’ll soon be able to put this new feature through its paces on the public test site. And be sure to check out our Custom Perspectives Directory to get a taste of the many ways Custom Perspectives can be put to good use.
- OmniFocus Collaboration – Omni previously announced upcoming support for linked tasks and plans to create a bridge between OmniFocus and OmniPlan. They’re upping their game and will be making it possible to share entire projects, not just individual tasks.
- Support for Silicon — Apple announced that they’re moving away from Intel-based Macs in favour of their own Apple silicon processors. Omni’s first priority is to ensure compatibility with new Macs as they’re released as a stepping stone to fully embracing Apple silicon.
Rethinking OmniFocus
The next major release of macOS will be macOS 11 (aka “Big Sur”). It will feature a striking new visual design and will open up plenty of new possibilities behind the scenes.
In light of all of these changes, Omni is taking a step back to rethink their apps, looking at how they can best leverage these exciting new developments and improve the flow of using their apps on all of the supported platforms. The years of feedback they’ve received from Omni customers will also help inform their design choices.
While this redesign won’t be ready for September, Omni may have some preliminary OmniFocus test builds for you to check out by then. In the meantime, Omni will make sure that OmniFocus continues to run well on Apple’s updated operating systems.
Purchasing and Subscribing to OmniFocus
You’ll continue to have the option of either purchasing or subscribing to OmniFocus, with enhancements that make both options more convenient and flexible:
Omnifocus Web Beta
- Sign-In Licensing – This new feature will alleviate the need to keep track of license codes for OmniFocus and other Omni apps. You’ll be able to unlock your purchased apps simply by signing into your Omni Account on all of your devices.
- Personal Subscriptions – Following in the footsteps of Team Subscriptions, Personal Subscriptions will be making their debut alongside Sign-In Licensing. This could be a good option for people who want a lower up-front cost and access to the latest version of OmniFocus on all supported platforms.
- Purchasing OmniFocus – Omni will continue to offer traditional licenses. They cost more upfront but tend to be less expensive in the long run. As it stands, OmniFocus is a separate purchase on macOS and iOS/iPadOS. In the future, you’ll be able to unlock OmniFocus on all of your devices with a single purchase.
Upcoming Learn OmniFocus Content and LIVE Sessions
We’re following these developments closely and are hard at work behind the scenes preparing new content and LIVE sessions to help you make productive use of current and upcoming features.
While new features are great, it’s also important to develop productive practices that focus on making good use of your time and energy. We make a point of weaving best practices and productivity methodologies into everything that we do to support you in living a fulfilling and productive life with some help from OmniFocus and complementary productivity apps.
Thanks, Omni Group
Many thanks to the talented folks at Omni for all of the time and energy they continue to put into their apps.
Many busy professionals choose OmniFocus because of its power and flexibility, helping them tame the chaos and focus on the right tasks at the right time. We have some exciting news to share today for OmniFocus for the Web users, but first I’d like to talk about where we started and our progress to date.
When we launched OmniFocus for the Web, we included the core set of built-in perspectives from our first iPhone app. These built-in perspectives let you work with task lists from your inbox, project lists, and tag lists, giving you different ways to slice and dice your tasks.
We also included basic support for filtering those lists, so you could focus on:
- your remaining incomplete items,
- available items (that aren’t blocked by an earlier task or a defer date),
- the first available items from each project (so you can see the next action that will move those projects forward), or
- the entire list (including completed and dropped tasks) so you can view the full history of a project.
After launching OmniFocus for the Web, we immediately turned our attention to adding our trademark Forecast perspective, which displays upcoming tasks on a calendar so that you’re not surprised when a due date arrives.
We’ve done several other minor updates since then, but today marks the moment many of our web customers have been waiting for—the day we take the web app beyond those basic features and add support for our most important Pro feature.
OmniFocus for the Web now has support for viewing custom perspectives!
With custom perspectives, you can customize your own views in OmniFocus to truly make the app your own. You can set up personalized combinations of filter rules to show you the items you’re most interested in, and those custom perspectives are synced to all your devices. Want to see every flagged task related to work that hasn’t been completed, grouped by when you last edited those tasks? Or perhaps you want to pull up a list of everything you have finished, grouped by completion date? Or see everything in your Family folder tagged with Errand or Groceries, but not if it contains the word “egg” or belongs to a project tagged Birthday?
OK, that last example is a bit ridiculous, I know, but all of these views are easy to define using a custom perspective—and now that custom perspectives are supported in the web app you can access those perspectives from any desktop system.
(I should note that it’s not yet possible to create or edit custom perspectives using the web app: that process still happens on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. We do want to support that eventually, but being able to view custom perspectives everywhere is a much higher priority than being able to edit them everywhere.)
Custom perspectives can be marked as favorites so that they always appear on your sidebar, and can even be bookmarked in your browser for direct access.
Omnifocus Email
Because custom perspectives are much more flexible than the built-in perspectives we were previously displaying, we ended up building a whole new set of back-end APIs to support them. These newer APIs are more flexible, allowing more types of content in the presented outline to allow grouping by date and so on. And they also have much better performance for large databases. Even when testing large perspectives with tens of thousands of items, our new custom perspectives will display results in a blink of an eye.
This update is free for all OmniFocus subscribers (thank you for your support!). If you would like to give OmniFocus for the Web a try, you can start a free two-week trial at web.omnifocus.com. Cross-platform OmniFocus subscriptions are $9.99/month. If you already own OmniFocus for Mac, iPhone, or iPad, add a web-only subscription for just $4.99/month.
Enjoy!
(Feedback? I’d love to hear from you! You can find me on Twitter at @kcase, or send me an email at kc@omnigroup.com.)
Omnifocus Web