The Last To-Do App You’ll Ever Need: OmniFocus

You know that creeping suspicion that some of your strangest idiosyncrasies could not possibly be shared by anyone else ever?

You’re usually wrong.

Case in point: it turns out I’m far from the only one who has had about a dozen different to-do apps on his phone in the last couple months. But it’s a bad idea to use multiple apps to organize tasks. All the better if you can track everything through one clearinghouse.

OmniFocus is that place for me. In more than half a year of daily use (exception: techno-Sabbath), I’ve only found one real flaw in the program (sync is not seamless). Otherwise OmniFocus (a.k.a. OF) does everything I want a task management app to do, and many things I didn’t know I would want such an app to do.

First Things First: Learn OmniFocus Language

There’s a lot to OmniFocus. To get a quick overview, check out this video, or this one, which explains the fundamental OF concept of “perspectives,” ways of organizing and accessing your tasks.

Or skip the videos and read this one-paragraph simplification of what you need to know about OF terminology before using it:

Projects help you break a bigger endeavor down into its component actions. Projects can be Sequential (you have to do action 1 before you can do action 2) or Parallel (it doesn’t matter in which order you do the individual tasks). For that matter Projects can just have what Omni refers to as loosely-related but not interdependent “Single Actions,” like a grocery shopping list. Contexts allow you to organize actions according to the things/people/environment you need to do them: Office, iPad, Internet, Computer, Car (careful!), etc. The Forecast view shows your tasks chronologically in one place–I spend most of my time in this view. Or you can just make a quick entry in the Inbox, and then decide how to categorize it later.

iPad, showing various perspectives and Inbox (“Blog Posts” is a “custom perspective” available with iPad Pro version)

The Inbox is the starting point–OmniFocus suggests that you take some time to just “brain dump” everything there and then assign Contexts and Projects, due dates and duration times later.

Using OF requires some patience and learning, but is worth the investment of time if you’re serious about project and task management.

Contexts in iPad — Contexts perspective in iPad

OmniFocus is Ubiquitous Across Devices and Apps

OF syncs automatically across Mac, iPad, and iPhone. When you are in the Forecast perspective, both the iOS apps and the OSX app allow you to see your Calendar Events right next to your actions for the day:

iPhone Forecast View — iPhone Forecast perspective

I even figured out, using their Clip-o-Tron 3001, how to turn Mac Mail messages into tasks with a keyboard shortcut. (Email inboxes are not a good place to keep tasks, you realize.)

And I love the Share Extension in iOS8. From almost any app I can create an OmniFocus task. I do this regularly. I see something I like, so share to OF:

From Safari, for example, the Note is automatically populated with the article link, and I can set the Project and Context:

One lack in the Share Extension is the ability to assign a due date from the screen shown above–you have to manually open OmniFocus if you want to do that. However, the more I use OmniFocus, the more convinced I am to only set due dates if absolutely necessary–you can always look through undated tasks in your weekly review, which OF makes really easy with their excellent Review perspective:

OmniFocus for Mac Review Perspective — OmniFocus for Mac Review perspective

What if you’re on a library computer or PC or purchased OF for Mac only and see something on your phone that needs to become a task?

OmniFocus gives you your own unique email address, to which you can email a task. This “Mail Drop” feature helps get the user close to Inbox Zero on email, too, since you can just forward a Gmail message to OmniFocus, where it will end up in your OF for future processing. In other words, you can input OmniFocus tasks from anywhere.

And TextExpander helps here. That app allows you to type your own abbreviations that then expand into text of your choosing. With TextExpander enabled, I write “.omni” and my OmniFocus task capture email address (which is neither short nor memorable) pops up right away.

Another way you can input tasks? Connect your OmniFocus in iOS to the Reminders app, then you can tell Siri to remind you something, and it goes into OmniFocus. Awesome!

Bonus: It Does Photos and Voice Memos

The iOS OF apps even allow attachments to tasks. If I’m processing paperwork and need to set a reminder to pay a bill, I can just take a picture of the bill from OF and save it to a task. Whenever I pull that task up on my computer or other device, the photo will be there.

You can also tap on the “Attachments” tab to record a voice memo, and save a task that way.

Limitations

There are some limitations to using OmniFocus, though not many, and far fewer than other task management apps. Its sync function, which uses Omni servers, operates with a delay. Though sync is supposed to be seamless, it doesn’t function with the same instantaneous speed as, say, Apple’s native Reminders app. On the ground level this means that if I work through a task list on my computer but don’t have the OF iPhone app open (even though background refresh is on), I will still get outdated task notifications on my phone until the sync properly takes place. This is a daily frustration, even if a minor drawback compared to all the other robust features.

The workaround for this is to manually sync the app each time I update it, to make sure it’s up-to-the-minute. OmniFocus has made improvements here since I started using it, but I hope it will soon match what other apps do by way of syncing speed.

OmniFocus is not cheap–they’re working on making their iOS app universal (very soon), but in the meantime, there is a separate Mac app, iPad app, and iPhone app available for purchase. It’s not on Windows or Droid.

However, if (a) you have a complex set of roles, priorities, and tasks to manage, (b) you don’t feel fully on top of them, and (c) you’re willing to take the time to learn OF, it’s well worth the purchase price. One could probably get by with OF on just one platform, too, though if funds permit, having it on a mobile device and a desktop is an advantage.

Made with Care: Some More Thoughtfully Designed Features

The longer I use OmniFocus, the more I appreciate some little features. Just the other day I noticed for the first time that in your perspectives sidebar on Mac, if there are items in that perspective to process, a little colored bar on the left highlights that perspective.

The image at left tells me I am due my Review, that there are items in the Forecast (i.e., scheduled actions), and that there are some entries in my OmniFocus Inbox needing attention.

There are lots of nice little touches like this–the color of your task circles, for example, varies depending on the status of the task (whether flagged, due soon, overdue, repeated, etc.).

And one of the best intangibles for me has been the ease of accessing the help manuals. Sure, you can get impressive help information from within the app, but OmniFocus has made their iPhone, iPad, and Mac help manuals available as free iBooks downloads so you can annotate them to your heart’s content.

Also, using Control-Option-Space on Mac, you can open a Quick Entry pop-up to enter an Inbox item. As long as OF is open, you can do this from anywhere on your computer.

Two more sweet little features I love about the iPhone version–there’s a little “+” icon for an new Inbox entry on just about any screen within the app, so adding tasks is easy, no matter where you are in the app. And once you add a task in iPhone or iPad, you can not only Save it, but can tap on “Save +” to go right to a new task entry. In other words, you can add a task and not be sent back to your Inbox, but keep adding task after task. I find this feature essential when I’m using OF to track action steps in meetings.

I could go on. Lots of people have! It seems that explaining OmniFocus is its own third-party cottage industry.

TL;DR version? (I know–I am supposed to put that at the top of the post.) OmniFocus is an amazing app, designed with care, and more than any other tool has helped me to greatly improve personal productivity. With a good system in place, I spend less time worrying about what I’m forgetting and more time doing what I know I’m supposed to do.

Thanks to the fine folks at Omni Group, the makers of OmniFocus, for giving me downloads for the Mac and iOS apps for this review. See my other AppTastic Tuesday reviews here.

AppTastic Tuesday: Ulysses (Part 1)

There are two things that seem to be all the rage in the world of writing and software: (1) Markdown and (2) “distraction-free” writing environments.

I’m more interested in the latter than in the former—I’m actively trying to root out distractions wherever they may be found. But Markdown is easy, everywhere, and seems a good way to explore learning other, more complex coding languages.

Ulysses offers both, and then some, with the goal of eliminating anything that takes the writer away from her or his craft of constructing words, sentences, and stories.

In fact, I’ve written and edited this post in Ulysses, then exported it as html into my WordPress blog.

In this review post and a second follow-up entry soon to follow, I write about:

Getting Text Into Ulysses
Ulysses as a Writing Environment
Getting Text Out of Ulysses
Ulysses as a Writing Experience

1. Getting Text Into Ulysses

Good writers need good tools, so a serious scribe will take time to track down a trustworthy tool, but one does want to be able to just open whatever program and start writing.

Getting to a new Sheet (Ulysses’s more-or-less equivalent of a document) is easy, even with no experience of the app, so one can just start writing in the default three-pane workspace:

The Editor is where the magic happens (i.e., you write the stuff). Using keyboard shortcuts or the menu bar, you can have one, two, or three panes visible. If you’re really hunkering down, you might not need to see your Sheet List, so can go to the Editor Only view.

However many panes you want to see at once (and Ulysses also allows multiple Windows open at once), starting to write in Ulysses is easy.

But what about importing text you’ve already got somewhere else?

Easy (mostly). You can copy-paste, even preserving formatting, or you can import a file wholesale by dragging it from a Finder window into the Ulysses sidebar, if it’s of the kind Ulysses will recognize. (My .zrtf Nisus Writer Pro tests did not work, but Ulysses did accept a sample .rtf file and even a Microsoft Word .docx file.)

2. Ulysses as a Writing Environment

So you can get writing right away in Ulysses, either from scratch or from pre-existing projects in (some) other formats. That’s a plus.

Writing in Ulysses itself has been a very positive—even a focusing and relaxing—experience. More on that in the next post. Ulysses as a writing environment requires some effort to learn.

For example, there’s the terminology (Sheets, Groups, Filters), though that’s pretty easy to pick up right away. And there’s the three-pane layout—though Mac Mail and other apps have prepped users for that. There’s also the lack of tie-in to the Mac Finder and files with file names.

That has taken some getting used to, but it’s not cumbersome by any means. In fact, Ulysses’s powerful search option (⌘-O) has meant I can always find anything I am looking for—quickly.

One nice touch in the app is that there are three Groups full of explanatory Sheets that tell you just about all you need to get started:

First Steps
Finer Details
Shortcuts And Other Tips

Here’s what they look like (in the easy-on-the-eyes Dark Mode with Dark Theme):

They’re like help files, only more fun and experiential.

Note also the fourth pane at far right, where I have added some Keywords (“I read this”—I have used that as a label to track my progress through the help Sheets) as well as a Note. Via this Attachments Bar you can also add an image or set a word count writing goal for yourself.

And the app can do some pretty sweet stuff. Here’s a sampling:

You can select a couple of Sheets and “glue them together” using ⌘J, which is good for putting chapters or sections together
You can split a Sheet into two Sheets, which is what I’ve done with this blog post that started as one and now will be in two parts
From the Editor (the pane where you do the writing) you can go up and down your various Sheets using the ⌥⌘↓/↑ keyboard shortcuts
The Show Markup option (keyboard shortcut= ⌘-9) is really helpful, especially to folks like me who are new to Markup
Did I mention how easy on the eyes the Dark Theme/Dark Mode option is for nighttime writing?
You can make comments to yourself using Markup that will show in the Editor pane but won’t export when you’re ready to publish

There are many more features listed here.

The few things that at first seemed like limitations in Ulysses were, in fact, easy to pull off by selecting the right menu item.

I haven’t been able to find anything like navigation arrows in the toolbar—having these readily visible would easily allow one to move between Sheets and search results without having to have two app windows open at once, but there may be a solution I just haven’t found yet.

So far, though Ulysses has required some adjustment to my workflow, I’ve really been enjoying writing in it.

My Ulysses Statistics are telling me this post has exceeded 900 words, so I’ll write more next time about (3) Getting Text Out of Ulysses (i.e., export functions) and (4) Ulysses as a Writing Experience.

Thanks to The Soulmen Gbr, developers of Ulysses, for giving me a download for the review. See my other AppTastic Tuesday reviews here.

AppTastic Tuesday: Say & Go

Back in the days before Facebook and iPhones, I walked around my college campus with a mini-cassette recorder to capture my freshman year pontificating about all aspects of life. It’s amazing how lengthy and involved some of those reflections were.

After a while I started holding forth verbally less and rocking out musically more, using the recorder to get all my songwriting ideas down right away.

For as advanced as the iPhone is–and it includes a built-in voice memo recording app–it wasn’t until I started using the app Say & Go that I started treating the phone as a suitable replacement for that Sony tiny tape recorder.

First, let me show you how I use the app, then I’ll show you a few of the under-the-hood settings you can tweak.

A brilliant idea comes my way, I grab my phone, and launch Say & Go:

Because of how I have the app configured, the second I tap the app icon, it starts recording:

The app intentionally limits recording length to anywhere between 4 and 15 seconds. I find 9 seconds is a good amount of time to get most ideas down. But what if I want to record a song snippet?

I can simply swipe right or tap on “Longer Recording” in the image above to get a minute-long option:

As if this isn’t sleek enough (and what a sweet, elegant layout this app has), the best part of the app is what’s next: I can now send my recording to an email address of my choosing, or set the app to save the recording to my Dropbox or… wait for it… to Evernote.

All I had to do was enter my Evernote email-to address in the “Default E-mail Recipient” line above. Now, after a single tap on the icon on my home screen, all my recordings go straight into Evernote as soon as the recording time runs out. Impressive.

There are a few other customizable settings. In the short workflow described above, I have “Autostart” enabled, but you don’t have to:

And here are some of the other settings you can adjust:

It’s a brilliantly designed and useful app. Read more about it here.

Thanks to Dawid Pietrala, the developer of Say & Go, for giving me a download for the review. Check out the app’s iOS page here. See my other AppTastic Tuesday reviews here.

AppTastic Tuesday: OfficeTime Time Tracker

The best iPhone time tracker I’ve seen is OfficeTime. It is simple, fast, effective, and easy to get in and out of quickly to start tracking time and get right back to work.

You can set up your Projects and Categories (I use these as two levels of task grouping), and tap on each to see how much time you’ve spent in a certain part of your work. I don’t use the Expenses feature of the app, but if you were a sub-contracting consultant keeping track of work for multiple clients, OfficeTime would be immensely helpful in tracking billing.

Pulling up a new time/task entry is easy:

“Notes” allows you to write more details about what task you’re working on.

Not only can you look at all your time entries in a week by Project and Category, but you can see (as below) a virtual Timesheet of your week.

The iPhone app can sync automatically to the desktop version of OfficeTime, though you have to actually be on the same wireless network to do it. Similarly, the iPad app can sync to a computer (and vice versa), but the data cannot sync automatically between iPad and iPhone apps. That is one of the few drawbacks I’ve found in OfficeTime.

I’ll post more in a future review about the desktop app, and also report back on exporting features.

The lack of a full-bodied sync option hasn’t really stopped me, though, since I can keep all the data on my phone and then sync with my work computer when I’m in the office.

OfficeTime has a free Mac trial version, and a free iOS version to try here. The paid iOS version is $7.99 and works on both iPhone and iPad.

If you are the time tracking sort, and want a full-bodied way to keep track on the go, OfficeTime officially rates the Words on the Word title of AppTastic.

Thanks to the makers of OfficeTime for giving me a download for the review. Check out the app’s iOS page here. See my other AppTastic Tuesday reviews here.

Free Demo Version of Accordance 11 is Now Available

It’s Apptastic Tuesday here at Words on the Word, and there are few apps that are more AppTastic than Accordance Bible Software.

Today they’ve announced that there is a free demo version of Accordance 11 available. I can’t recommend their software highly enough. See my full review of Accordance 11 if you want to learn more, or just go here to check out the free demo and see what you think.

A Chore Chart and Allowance Tracker–on Your Phone

Sure, there’s a chance that over-reliance on a monetized chore chart can have negative effects on children. But we parents also want to teach our kids about the importance of work, responsibility, and the basics of financial management.

There’s still not an iPhone app for making you a better parent. In fact, probably less time on apps in general makes better parents. However, a number of us moms and dads already spend time each day managing tasks, finances, and other activities on a phone… so why not a chore chart?

Enter iAllowance.

Those are my sweet kids (names blurred out–you see their names on the app).

They’ve got their own corner of the app where we track their stars (earned or docked for behavior) and money (allowance, and stars converted to money).

The app has a bunch of pre-set chores you can select to track for each kid–at a frequency of your choosing.

And you can add your own. (We added, “Make the bus on time”–everyone gets a star when that happens!)

You can set how many stars equate to a monetary amount, and then have the app make the transfer for you. We were paying our kids 10 cents a star, but we were doling out a lot of money! So we changed it to 5 cents a star.

You can also set up different accounts for each child. We have one for Church, one for Savings, and one for Spending. The Totals screen shows you all that, as well as Stars and Time (one of the few features I haven’t used in the app):

iAllowance is a really a great (and fun) app. It syncs via Dropbox or iCloud with an iPad. As a universal app, if you buy it, you can use it (and sync it) on any iOS device.

The kids love it, too. It’s been an effective motivator, and really fun for them to tap their stars at the end of the day–or tap on “Bad Behavior” and see a frowny face. 😦

Any time you tap next to a chore (which you can do in the Day view or Week view) you get an accompanying sound effect, too. And the allowance deposits happen automatically, in the amounts and to the accounts that you specify.

The app runs smoothly, and the developer is one of the most responsive (if not the most responsive) developers I’ve ever been in touch with.

I can’t say whether a incentive-based program will work for you and–if it will–whether you should run it from a mobile device. But I can say that both the overall setup of stars and allowance, as well as this particular app, have really helped perk up some listening ears around here!

Now… I’ve got to go give myself a star for posting another Apptastic Tuesday review, Blizzard 2015 notwithstanding.

Thanks to the developer of iAllowance for giving me a download for the review. Check out the app’s site here. You can find the full (paid) version here, and try the free version here.

AppTastic Tuesday: Captio

Last week on AppTastic Tuesday: Rules! This week: Captio.

The goal of Captio is a simple one: to very quickly pull up a screen into which you can type text or stick a photograph, and then email it to yourself.

It works in iPhone in both portrait and landscape mode. Here’s the New Note screen, which lets you (a) enter text, (b) select a photo from your phone, or (c) take a new photo:

You might quickly pull up Captio to jot down a reminder or bit of information you want to access later. Then you tap Send, and your text or image is sent to your email address.

You can adjust some settings–for example, have a prefix of “Captio” or “Remember” or anything else in the subject of the email that Captio sends:

And, what is best, you can send it to any email address. This is especially helpful if you have a to-do system (like Evernote or OmniFocus) that allows you to email items directly into those apps.

This is where I’ve found Captio most useful. It can take Evernote and (especially) OmniFocus a few seconds to load and sync–Captio, by contrast, gives you a text entry screen as soon as you tap it.

Captio is also available within other apps via the Share Extensions:

I’ve not personally seen a need to use the Share Extension–it works great, but if I’m saving a Web article to read later, I’ll just use the Evernote Share Extension anyway. Or the OmniFocus Share Extension to create a task from a photo. But for folks who primarily rely on email to keep reminders (not a good idea, but a widespread practice), Captio can help from just about anywhere on your phone or iPad.

Captio also stores all the notes you send, right on your device, so you can use it with or without Internet/data connections.

And, though all the shots above are from an iPhone, Captio is a universal app. So for $1.99 (at the time of this post), you can use it on both iPhone and iPad.

Thanks to the makers of Captio for giving me a download for the review. Check out the app’s site here.

AppTastic Tuesday: Rules!

Today begins what will be a mainstay of Words on the Word in 2015: AppTastic Tuesdays. First up: the iOS app Rules!

Rules! is part zone-out tapping, part memory-training app. The gameplay itself is fast-paced, fun, easy, and aesthetically pleasing. Watch this short trailer to get caught up:

The actual tapping of icons is easy–the game is quite touch-responsive and fast. And the rules are clear enough:

When you complete what rule 1 calls for, you move up to rule 2. Having completed rule 2 on the screen, you then apply rule 1 to the remaining icons. There are 100 levels of rules, though I have barely made it past 15.

When the game introduces a new rule, you get a screen like this:

But then after completing rule 13, it tells you simply, “Now follow rule 12,” “Now follow rule 11,” “Now follow rule 9,” and so on.

So it’s more than about the gameplay itself–you’ve got to memorize the rules as you go; you’ve got to know them by number.

This makes it a less-than-ideal zone-out game. Threes is by no means boring but mindless enough that you can come home to it at the end of a long day. Rules! is not so. It demands more of your mind.

You will probably find yourself, as I did, using some mnemonic device to remember 8-10 rules at once, so you can perform the appropriate actions on the screen in front of you.

There are three game modes: Beginner, Expert, Timeless (i.e., no countdown clock). The scoring rewards you for speed and accuracy:

The need to memorize a host of rules in order to do well caused me to lose interest more quickly with Rules! than I have with other iOS games.

But Rules! especially excels in two areas: (1) its accompanying music is pretty, well-written, and good for focusing, and (2) its layout and design is gorgeous. Even the fail screen looks good:

So, for $1.99 in the App Store, if you’re up for a mental challenge with good music and beautiful design, check it out and see if you can–as one player on Twitter recently did–get through all 100 levels.

Thanks to the makers of Rules! for giving me a download for the review. Check out the app’s site here.

First Things First: Learn OmniFocus Language

OmniFocus is Ubiquitous Across Devices and Apps

Bonus: It Does Photos and Voice Memos

Limitations

Made with Care: Some More Thoughtfully Designed Features

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1. Getting Text Into Ulysses

2. Ulysses as a Writing Environment

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