OmniFocus Release Notes

OmniFocus 1.6.1 - May 4, 2009

Operating system compatibility
- Fixed some issues with the Bonjour sync server on 10.4 where it could return a 502 "Bad Gateway" error after changes to the network configuration.
- Fixed a compatibility issue with clipping from MailTags on 10.4.
- Added a compatibility fix for AppleScript clipping handlers.
Syncing
- Synchronization clients can lock down fewer transactions, allowing the database to compact more frequently.
- Updated the sync logic to be compatible with some upcoming sync performance enhancements.
- Updated the syncing logic to ignore synced perspectives from OmniFocus 1.7 (rather than reporting an error because 1.6 doesn't know what to do with them).
Attachments
- Fixed an issue which could cause attachments to temporarily disappear for users who weren't synchronizing their database. (The attachments would disappear after compacting, then reappear when the database cache was rebuilt.)
- When an attachment can't be found while moving old data to the archive, OmniFocus no longer gives up with an "Unable to create XML archive" error message. Instead, it logs a warning to the system console and skips the missing attachment.
Miscellaneous
- The "Due or Flagged" filter now includes items with inherited flags, just as the "Flagged" filter does.
- Updated the German, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, Dutch and Chinese localizations.
- When picking dates using the popup calendar, fixed some bugs with using the keyboard to confirm (Enter) or cancel (Escape) the selected date.
- Updated the help so it returns results when searching for "themes" (not just "theme").
- Added a hidden GrowlNotificationLimit preference which controls the number of growl notifications OmniFocus is willing to post simultaneously. (The default limit is 5.)

OmniFocus 1.6 - Mar 10, 2009

New features
- Actions and Projects have the option to complete when all of their children have completed. This is settable on a per item basis in the inspector, and as a synchronized global setting in preferences. (If you're using this feature and synchronizing with an iPhone, be sure to use OmniFocus for iPhone v1.2 or later.)
- Actions without contexts are no longer considered unavailable.
- The "Inbox" and "No Context" groups can now be filtered using the action filters.
- Added an option to filter by "Due or Flagged" in Context view. This will show actions that are either Due, Overdue, or Flagged.
- Added a repeat indicator next to the flagged indicator, so you can tell at a glance which items are set to repeat.
- You can now use the Edit->Sort menu to sort items in the inbox.
Main window
- Marking a project as reviewed now advances the selection to the next project which needs review.
- Marking a project as reviewed now saves any text field edits which might be in progress.
- Pressing Escape when using SmartMatch will revert to your previous selection rather than taking the current value.
- Double-clicking an expansion triangle should expand/collapse, not beep.
- Improved handling of resizing the sidebar.
- Changed an annoying error panel to just a bonk sound when moving items where they're not allowed.
- Show an indicator when archiving.
- Don't have the SmartMatch completions suddenly close in certain cases.
- Do a better job of making sure that your window is visible when restarting OmniFocus after removing a display from your setup.
- Creating a new sub context with command-return should now work correctly.
- Removed the striped background from the Inbox.
- The "No Project" and "No Context" labels are now only displayed when mousing over or editing a row (rather than displaying them at all times).
- The "Mark Reviewed" toolbar button is now disabled at appropriate times.
- The "Show All" toolbar item will no longer briefly change its label to "Focus" when the Option key is pressed.
- Fixed a bug where the "No due date" group in context mode wouldn't always update properly when selecting different contexts in the sidebar.
- The inbox counter now counts remaining, non-deferred inbox items.
- Fixed the handling of Enter on keyboards (such as laptops) which use Function-Return to mean Enter rather than a dedicated Enter key.
- Added a new "Flagged" collation type for Context view. This lets you group by Flagged and order by Due to show a single list which includes all your flagged items, then remaining due items, then everything else.
- Fixed a bug where reordering contexts in the sidebar (with the mouse or keyboard) would display an "Unable to move" alert.
- Fixed the color of the insertion point when editing notes.
- Transparent project background colors (set in Style Preferences) are now rendered properly.
- The "No Project" and "No Context" labels now wrap correctly when the project and context fields are resized.
- Change the background color of the search filter to your selection color when there is a search active to remind that some of your data is likely not showing.
Perspectives
- The settings for perspectives are now visible by default.
- Fixed an issue with Perspective icons.
- Don't hide the Perspectives window when making a new perspective from the menu.
- The built-in perspective toolbar icons now draw as selected, and any new windows have the item selected as well.
- Don't hide the toolbar when deleting the currently active perspective.
- All built-in perspectives will now open a new window if necessary when opening from the menu (rather than doing nothing).
- The built-in Flagged and Due perspectives now show items which don't have contexts along with those which do.
- Fixed a typo in the built-in Context perspective's tooltip. (It was missing its last letter!)
- Resizing the width of the Perspectives window no longer changes the width of the view settings (the area on the right), which rarely need to be wider or narrower. (You can still resize that area by dragging the separator.)
Preferences
- Prevent syncing preferences from trying to show 2 sync types at once.
- Preferences layout cleaned up.
- Some cleanup of the Styles Preferences.
- Labels made more consistent throughout.
- Warn that applying a theme will overwrite your current theme, and you should stop and save the current theme if you want to save it.
- When choosing a near-white font in the styles preferences, have the color in the outline show as black so that it's readable.
- All automatic backups now get properly placed in the specified location.
- When clicking between the different sync options we don't throw away what you've typed since its often accidental when initially setting up sync.
- When entering an address for a WebDAV server we try to fix bad URLs (warning when we do).
- The preferences help buttons now scroll to the top of their respective help pages.
- Simplified URL entry in the advanced location field of Sync Preferences.
- In Style Preferences, you can tab through the controls in a much more reasonable order. Also, the text fields correctly display a focus ring when you tab into them, and their associated arrows in the illustration now correctly lose their highlight whenever something else gets focus.
Date entry
- Fixed an issue with date entry so that we don't accidently get the first of the month instead of today when entering just a time.
- Fixed a date entry bug where we were adding a week when a weekday and +1w were used.
- Correctly have "noon" refer to 12pm, not 12 hours from now.
- The default time for due dates is now honored when picking a new due date using the calendar (not just when entering a date as text).
- Fixed a bug with reading time estimates in Italian (and possibly other non-English languages).
- Fixed some inconsistencies with date entry in the inspector (where it didn't match the results you'd get from entering the same date in the outline).
Menus and Dock
- You can attach folders as well as files through the "Attach File" menu item. (You could always drag in folders, but the open panel from Attach File wouldn't let you select one.)
- The status menu should only have active items when the items selected have statuses.
- The dock menu now shows contexts as nested menus instead of a giant huge long list.
- Added a new menu item, "Expand All Notes" with the hotkey of: "cmd-opt-'".
- Added a dock menu item to synchronize your database.
- Add sort options to the right click menu.
- Hide unavailable menu items when they can't be used.
- The main dock and menu bar counters no longer count No Context items against your inbox (since contexts are now optional).
- The Due Soon and Overdue counters in the menu bar and dock will no longer disappear when the main window is closed.
- When a folder is selected, the Edit->Status menu now shows options appropriate for that selection (i.e., you can change a folder's status between Active and Dropped).
Syncing
- You can now choose which port the local Bonjour server should run on by setting the SyncServerPort default.
- Fixed overaggressive automatic syncs following an edit: when an edit is synchronized, the subsequent automatic sync will be scheduled for one hour later rather than one minute later.
- Improved sync performance: syncing will no longer rebuild the entire database unless there is a server vs. local conflict.
- Fixed a double-display of tasks when grouping tasks by date in context mode and syncing pulled a change from another client that changed the group that should contain the task.
- Context icons in the sidebar will now update properly after syncing. (Previously, changing a context to On Hold or Dropped wouldn't refresh its icon in the the sidebar until you switched views.)
- Only one sync error dialog will be opened at a time.
Clippings
- Fixed Mail Clippings links to messages sent from Entourage.
- The OmniWeb clipping handler now supports clipping with no selection (if you're running OmniWeb 5.9.1 or later).
- Installing the OmniFocus Mail Clip-O-Tron 3000 (also known as the OmniMailMessageServiceEnabler) will no longer prevent you from upgrading OmniFocus while Mail is running. (You must reinstall the Clip-O-Tron 3000 to apply this fix.)
- Fixed the inconsistent localization of the clippings shortcut preference which was breaking it for languages other than English.
Help
- Updated the introduction to the online help for style preferences.
- The online help now has more explicit documentation of custom perspective icons.
- Updated the online help to explain dropping folders.
- The online help for style preferences now describes how to save and load theme files.
- The online help for customizing columns now explains how to set the default column state (so you can make sure your due dates are always visible).
AppleScript
- Added AppleScript to distinguish between syncing with iCal and syncing with your webdav/MobileMe server.
- Update AppleScript to only close the current window when calling "close".
- The AppleScript "archive" command now supports a "using cache" parameter which specifies whether new XML is generated from the cache database (rather than the standard behavior of simply copying the XML specified in existing transactions).
Miscellaneous
- Fixed a printing issue where we were laying out the outline with a screen font, but printing it with a printer font. This caused gaps after ligatures in words like "shuffle" and "files".
- When there are more than 4 due actions available just show one Growl notification.
- You should now be able to cancel an import from OmniOutliner from the import dialog.
- Assigning a project to inbox item updates the item's modified date.
- Update the MobileMe authentication panel to have the OmniFocus icon on it, so that you know why you're being asked for your information.
- Non-English users should be able to type English words and abbreviations into the duration field as well as their native words and abbreviations.
- Preserve newlines in notes when exporting to HTML.
- The Quick Entry window now has a title that is never seen by the user, but should allow 3rd party virtual desktop managers to handle it. It's called "OmniFocus QuickEntry".
- When printing use the correct parallel/sequential icon.
- The Context inspector now accurately displays the state of the selected contexts when changed via controls other than the inspector.
- Updated the automatic URL recognizer to handle URLs with embedded braces, as well as message URLs from Mail with their embedded angle brackets. (Some characters still require that you surround the entire URL with angle brackets to help the recognizer distinguish between it and any surrounding text.)
- The automatic Mail Rule (enabled in Mail Preferences) will no longer try to create tasks out of lines which have more than two dashes.
- Sync with iCal now refers you to the correct preference pane when you haven't yet mapped any OmniFocus contexts to iCal calendars.
- Sorting items by due date (using the Edit->Sort menu) now sorts items without due dates to the bottom of the list.
Stability
- Fixed an issue where OmniFocus would refuse to quit when it couldn't open its database.
- OmniFocus will no longer refuse to quit when it encounters sync or backup errors.
- Fixed a crash encountered when running a non-existent script from the toolbar.
- Fixed crashes caused by creating and destroying projects in a focused window.
- Fixed some crashes related to Spaces.
- Fixed numerous issues with the Toolbar that were causing crashes with printing, perspectives, and some other places as well. This seemed to be due to a change in a recent update of the OS.
- Don't crash when entering a date that doesn't validate into the archive panel.
- Fixed a crash when deleting a project or folder that is part of the focus set in a window.
- Fixed a rare undo/redo crasher.
- Fixed a crash when creating an action while viewing completed projects & actions.
- Fixed a crash encountered when editing an item in a filtered search so it no longer matches the search filter, then pressing return to add a new item. (OmniFocus was trying to insert the new item after the edited item which had just been removed from the outline, and couldn't figure out where to put it. Now it just beeps rather than crashing.)
- Fixed a crash which could happen when using Command-Return in a SmartMatch field to create a nested context which partially matched another context.
- Fixed a crash encountered on PowerPC systems when using the Clippings service to capture an image.
- If OmniFocus is unable to access the user's temporary directory (usually due to a permissions issue), it writes its temporary files within its database rather than reporting an error.
- Fixed a long delay on launch when Bonjour syncing was enabled on systems which didn't have a reverse DNS entry.
- Revert to Database Backup no longer reports "operation could not be completed" when sync is disabled.