OmniFocus 1.8 — September 8, 2010

OmniFocus 1.8 for Mac simplifies the basic task workflow, eliminating the need to Clean Up after making project and context assignments, and offering more flexible view and custom perspective options. It makes a number of minor improvements to the interface, while also improving synchronization, stability, performance, and making many enhancements to better support custom workflows using AppleScript.

We've also learned a lot while developing OmniFocus for iPad, which has been receiving rave reviews for unique features like its Forecast and Review modes. We haven't had time yet to bring those new features to this release of OmniFocus for Mac, but that's definitely the direction in which we're headed.

• Workflow Improvements
  • OmniFocus for Mac will now clean up automatically when switching views, just like the iPhone and iPad apps do.
  • We've reorganized the filtering options in the View Bar, separating the Availability Filter from the Status Filter and adding some new options. For example, you can now choose to show all Remaining items which are either Due or Flagged—or only those Due or Flagged items which are currently Available.
  • Context mode can now display all actions at once: you no longer have to choose between showing Remaining or Completed actions. (This is great for viewing a list of all items by date modified, for example.)
  • Groups, Projects, and Inbox items can now show up in Context lists, Due lists, and Flagged lists. When actions are sorted by project, parent items follow their children (which is the natural order for completing them). Single Action Lists are not actionable, and do not appear in Context lists.
  • Groups are now considered actionable. They can block other actions in a sequence, and are eligible to become the first "next action" for a project. Projects and groups are blocked by their children, so if you're viewing Available actions in a context or due list they won't appear until all their children are complete.
  • Since projects are now actionable, they're now eligible to become their own next actions. This means you can work your way all the way through the completion a project while only viewing next actions.
  • When a project is on hold or otherwise inactive, its actions are no longer considered to be available.
  • Projects are now considered stalled when they are active but have no remaining actions.
  • Contexts which contain an actionable project or group are now considered active.
  • Groups of actions in the Inbox will no longer be automatically converted to projects when cleaning up. You can still promote them to projects by dragging them to the sidebar or by outdenting (Command-[). (This means that you can drag an entire project into the Inbox and it will stay there until you decide what to do with it.)
• Interface
  • Added "Hide Parent Items" to the View menu, for times where you want to want to view all remaining actions in Context Mode without seeing any projects or groups.
  • Since "Clean Up" is now automatic, the default toolbar now includes "Focus / Show All" rather than "Clean Up".
  • Updated the UI to reflect that parent items simply have a "Context" rather than a "Default Context". (All items potentially have contexts, and when a child item is created it is initially assigned the same context as its parent.)
  • Due filtering is now only available in context mode (where it correctly displays all due items), not planning mode (where it was only reliable for finding due projects, not due actions).
  • Duplicating a project from the sidebar no longer skips completed items in that project. (This matches the behavior of duplicating a project in the main outline.)
  • When grouping by Flagged in context mode, items with inherited flags now count as Flagged rather than as Unflagged.
  • Fixed a bug where clicking in the left portion of the sidebar's toolbar area would make the sidebar wider.
  • Fixed a bug where you couldn't always scroll all the way to the bottom after switching perspectives.
  • Fixed a bug where OmniFocus could incorrectly indicate you were in a perspective when opening a related window (e.g. double-clicking on an action in the Due perspective would claim that the new window was also in the Due perspective).
  • Improved handling of toolbar items which refer to missing perspectives.
  • Updated the iDisk icon in Sync Preferences.
  • Updated the flag in a number of icons.
  • Project mode can now display the Project column. (The current project is implied by the project hierarchy, but a separate column can be useful when reviewing a project and reassigning actions to different projects.)
  • The "No Context" sidebar item no longer counts items which are assigned to dropped contexts.
  • Fixed some regressions with the application unhiding while using Quick Entry.
  • The gear button in the column header area is no longer stretched and blurry, and its border line now lines up with the scroller line below it.
  • Updated the Mail clipping handler to make it clearer that it also works on Snow Leopard.
  • "Show in Context Mode" now works for projects.
  • Removed the accidentally-introduced (and never implemented) "Show Columns" menu item.
  • The project review popup no longer offers "hours" and "minutes" as available units.
  • "Show in Project/Context Mode" (also known as "Switch" in the toolbar) is now available for projects and inbox items, not just individual actions.
  • Fixed a bug where editing the action group style in Style Preferences would cause the expand/collapse handles to disappear.
  • Fixed a bug where selecting the "No Context" item from the menu bar would do nothing rather than showing you the corresponding items.
  • Fixed some inconsistencies between the sidebar's count of "No Context" items and the menu bar's count.
  • Worked around a bug where clipping selected text from Mail would result in a black text background after installing Safari 5.
• Quick Entry
  • Added support for the "Send to OmniFocus" bookmarklet for easily sending a web page to OmniFocus (as introduced in OmniFocus for iPhone).
  • Clippings now ignore all text foreground and background colors by default. This is controlled by the new ClippingsIgnoreTextForegroundColor and ClippingsIgnoreTextBackgroundColor hidden defaults.
  • You can now configure clippings to ignore attachments with the ClippingsIgnoreAttachments hidden default. (This is useful for people who send entire email messages straight from Mail to OmniFocus but don't generally want attachments to come along.)
• Perspectives
  • Added support for exporting perspectives as files by dragging them out of the perspectives window. (You can open one of those files to import that perspective into another database.)
  • The name of a built-in perspective is now based on your current localization rather than being a persistent, customizable setting. (You can always copy these built-in perspectives to your own perspectives and give your other copies different names.) This means that people who first created their database in one language but then switched to another won't wonder why half of their toolbar is still in the original language.
  • The built-in Completed perspective now shows completed items grouped and ordered by completion date.
  • A built-in perspective's icon will now reset when reverting the perspective to its default settings.
• Attachment List
  • The Attachment List now sorts its attachments when it first appears (rather than only sorting when you click on a column header).
  • The Attachment List now obeys your date format settings from System Preferences.
  • When the Attachment List is visible, it no longer shows up twice in the Window menu.
  • The Attachment List will no longer refuse to delete attachments which it can't find in the container's notes.
  • Double-clicking on an attachment in the Attachment List can now take you to inbox items.
• Synchronization
  • OmniFocus will no longer prompt users to synchronize devices which haven't synchronized in over a week. Instead, if the sync database needs to be compacted (i.e. it has over 250 transactions in its sync history) OmniFocus will automatically unregister devices which haven't synchronized in over three weeks.
  • Sync Preferences now has an option to publish an OmniFocus Reminders calendar for due task notifications.
  • Sync settings sent through email are now compatible with iPhone OS 3.0 and later. (In iPhone OS 3.0, iPhone Mail stopped recognizing dashes in URL schemes, so we've switched to using omnifocus:///setup-sync?url=...)
  • Edits in progress should no longer get lost when changes are synchronized from another computer.
  • Fixed a bug where syncing a change to an action's start date wouldn't always change its context's count of available actions.
  • Fixed a bug which could cause duplication of a repeating due project or group during synchronization.
  • Improved sync compatibility with some Windows WebDAV servers.
  • Fixed a problem where an out-of-date device would write out an "available" status update for projects which have become available since the last time OmniFocus was launched. When synchronized, this "available" status update could override an earlier "completed" status update from another device, causing completed projects to be reopened when the out-of-date device was synchronized.
  • Fixed a bug where setting a perspective's custom icon and then synchronizing old changes could result in a "Cannot Save" error.
  • Improved the reliability of syncing the order of your perspectives.
• Performance
  • Improved performance of switching between perspectives.
  • Improved editing performance in Quick Entry for databases with lots of projects.
  • Updated synchronization to handle WebDAV redirects more efficiently.
  • Fixed a bug where every perspective would get rewritten to the database the first time you edited a perspective after launch.
  • The Attachment List is much faster at handling long lists of attachments.
  • Improved performance of the Reset button in Style Preferences.
• Stability
  • Fixed a crash encountered when expanding an inspector after deleting the object it was inspecting before it was collapsed.
  • Fixed a crash sometimes encountered when double-clicking on Library in a focused window.
  • Fixed a crash when undoing the add of a new action to a stalled project while viewing stalled projects.
  • Fixed a crash sometimes encountered when changing perspectives while a search string is in place.
  • Fixed a bug where custom perspectives could be lost following a "Cannot Save" error.
  • Fixed a bug where replacing a perspective's custom icon could cause a crash.
  • Fixed a crash seen when double-clicking on a perspective icon attachment in the Attachment List.
  • Fixed a crash encountered on 10.4 when clicking on the column headers in the Attachment List.
  • Fixed a crash encountered when deleting large numbers of attachments at once.
  • Fixed a problem which could cause exceptions during an iCal sync ("-[NSNull urlInFile:]: unrecognized selector sent to instance").
  • Handled exceptions during iCal syncing so they won't cause subsequent "already participating in a sync" errors.
• Miscellaneous
  • Fixed a bug where Due Soon items wouldn't always update on schedule.
  • Added support for changing synchronized settings through settings links like this:
    • omnifocus:///change-setting?DefaultDueTime=22:00
  • Spotlight searches support searching for completed actions.
  • Updated the built-in help.
  • Checking for updates will no longer trigger an "invalid display" message to the Console.
  • Coalesced due notifications which are sent to Growl will no longer claim the actions are "newly available."
• AppleScript Support
  • The AppleScript select command on the sidebar will now work when focused and given a folder within that focus. This also fixes lose of selection in the sidebar when changing the filter. Thanks to Robin Trew for the report!
  • Fixed AppleScript documentation on the container property of folder.
  • Added AppleScript property effectively hidden on folder and context.
  • Added AppleScript class flattened folders as an element of document and folder.
  • Updated the AppleScript suite to define the types of some properties on task to allow "missing value". Without this, queries of this form would fail:

    	tell application "OmniFocus"
    		tell front document
    			flattened tasks where its start date is missing value
    		end tell
    	end tell
    	

    The properties changed by this are:

    • containing project
    • parent task
    • context
    • start date
    • due date
    • completion date
    • estimated minutes
    • next task
    • folder
    • repetition
  • Toolbar scripts will now preserve the value of global variables between runs. Compiled scripts which are run from the toolbar will save persistent variables between app launches.
  • Use the "integer" type for the recently added "number of tasks", "number of available tasks" and "number of completed tasks" properties. The "number" type works on Snow Leopard, but not on Leopard.
  • Updated "flattened context" support to be available on contexts as well as document.
  • Added "flattened task" support to task as well as document.
  • Added new AppleScript support for a "flattened context" element on document.
  • Added new AppleScript support for a "flattened project" element on document and folder. This returns a flattened in-order traversal of the projects within the specified container.
  • Added new AppleScript support for a "flattened task" element on document. This returns an flattened in-order traversal of the document.
  • Added new AppleScript properties on "task" for "number of tasks", "number of available tasks" and "number of completed tasks", making it easier to write "whose" clauses.
  • Fixed a crash encountered when a toolbar script closes its own window.
  • Customize Toolbar no longer lists script components within a script bundle alongside the bundle itself.
  • Added support for using AppleScript applications as toolbar items (in addition to the already supported scripts stored as text, compiled, script bundles, and Automator workflows).
  • Added support for using AppleScript applications as toolbar items (in addition to the already supported scripts stored as text, compiled, script bundles, and Automator workflows).

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