OmniFocus 4

This app is incredible. Thank you for all your hard work building and continuing to improve this vital tool.

Long-time OmniFocus user here, since OF2 days. Trying to organize tasks is very frustrating on this app, especially if you have a medium-to-large size project. Also, I miss the universal “quick entry” button. Too often I will try to drag the + button to quick entry when I am in Forecast, and it will assign a due date when really I just wanted to send it to the inbox.

Defer dates really need an option to automatically roll over to the current day if their defer date has passed. Or at least show past defer dates in forecast “past”. I.e I have 9 tasks due Friday and want to plan on working on 3 per day I use defer dates. If I don’t finish one task on a day I have to go looking for it in the project list, then update the defer date to today. Simple enough with just 9 tasks but with multiple projects and deadlines it’s way too easy for something to slip through the cracks.

After spending (a lot) more time with v4 , I’m raising my rating. Both iOS versions are actually a big improvement over v3, with lots of useful layout options now. The changes are pretty drastic, so be prepared to put in some time. But it’s definitely worth persisting. I’m not as happy with v4 Mac yet - but hopefully that will get better.

OF3 got me through my degree. I’d give the *Mac* version of OF4 5/5. Here, this UI is unbelievably bug-ridden. While editing tasks, when it’s not jumping around, it’s stalling or unresponsive. For now, I’d call this app read-only.

Long-time OmniFocus user here, since OF2 days. Firstly, this release is very buggy. For example, when assigning items in the inbox to projects, tags, etc, it misreads the taps. So whenever I tap Project, it opens the Repeat editor. Secondly it is missing a specific action in Shortcuts: “New Inbox Item”. In OF3 if you pressed this it would take you directly to a New Inbox item inspector sheet. But in OF4 you can only “Add Item” and leave the project blank if you want to add it to the Inbox. This seems like a pretty glaring omission for an app that is centered around quickly writing things down into the inbox GTD-style and then processing them later. What’s worse is that the lockscreen widget retains the OF3 functionality, so why can’t we have it again in Siri Shortcuts? I am disappointed the OmniFocus community waited years for this.

I’ve used this app since its inception years ago. Keep trying others from time to time, and keep coming back. There is just nothing else on the market that is comparable. The only pain point is that the sync is just too slow. This was acceptable 10 years ago. Today it isn’t. I have several others applications that sync far larger databases than OmniSync nearly instantaneously. I’ve often been working on my actions for 30 seconds or more before suddenly everything updates and I realize I wasn’t dealing with my latest data. Annoying. This is supposed to be a premium product. This is the only area that needs work.

I don’t think I’m coming back to OmniFocus. On paper, it’s great. In practice, it’s become awkward and ugly. Version 4 tries to improve on Version 3, but in my opinion it is not significantly better. It may be worse in some ways. I wish it were better, but it seems to be legacy software now, with little hope of keeping new users. Revised 6-8-2024: I keep trying OF4 every so often. Today I tried to move 9 old inbox items into a new project, and ended up with 9 new projects instead. I used to be able to use OF3, but OF4 seems like a dumpster fire.

I’ve been using OmniFocus for over 10 years. I have tried many other apps, but none come close to OmniFocus. With version 4, all of the rough edges have been smooth and refined. I am an Apple user just so I can use this app.

I have gone back and forth on this release but in the end I have found that Omnifocus works for me just as well as it has since I first used it many years ago. The new design could definitely use some cleanup but I find that I can make it work the way I want it to enough to use it daily, with hopes that the team will keep the updates coming.