A Series of Innovation at the Omni Group
"Real artists ship."
- Steve Jobs
I have always loved this simple quote that is attributed to Jobs.
For all of my hand-wringing about OmniFocus earlier in the year, I am glad that I have been proven wrong.
After hurriedly and worriedly jumping back to Things by Cultured Code in January of 2025 for fear that the Omni Group would simply let bugs and UI issues languish, it has once again been demonstrated that the productivity app team at The Omni Group has set their sights on not only introducing new amazing features, but also that they are committed to a solid experience in OmniFocus, regardless of device.
For people that used to say "Oh, I just do my real work on the Mac, I say: bullshit. I am extremely mobile in my day job, and I need my task manager to keep up with me. I do not want to coddle it, sacrifice my experience, or dumb down my life just because the app is not in a great state.
Frankly, that is where I felt I was with OmniFocus some months ago. I’d given Ken, Ainsley, and the rest of the team at the Omni Group a bit of a hard time about the state of OmniFocus and it’s SwiftUI bugs - because I truly felt that its solid reputation was not being lived up to. I knew that the team was capable of more. But I turned my back on them and their apps (did I ever mention I have historically had a low tolerance for inefficiency? I do.) in an about-face toward a rival app, Things.
When using Things, I never quite felt like it could handle my work load (heavy reliance on deferral of tasks, keeping my daily lists clean and manageable). It was absolutely beautiful, and in some regards the right-brain side of me was satiated with its appearance…until my workload just became too much for it. My Today list in Things would pile up with best-intention tasks that I was then forced to reconcile each morning. This is great for someone with a really curated, 5–10 tasks per day life.
But that someone is not me.
I have a team of 7 right now, I have a house to manage, my wife is recovering from a major surgery, I have two Ewoks running around the house (Shih Tzu’s), and creative endeavors to manage. It all became just too much for a very pretty to-do list manager.
In a leap of faith I began testing OmniFocus again toward the advent of OmniFocus 4.7, which, in my opinion, is where the Omni Group began showing what they were made of again. Planned dates, various repeat options with an all-important (to me) “repeat until ___” date, mutually exclusive tags, Forecast “dots” (to indicate how many items you have due today at a glance). These were the true innovations I was looking for in OmniFocus.
Couple this with the visual enhancements from this week’s OmniFocus 4.8 which introduces Liquid Glass to the masses of OmniFocus fans, and you have a team that is firing on all cylinders - and that is inspiring. I mean, I am managing tasks from my Apple CarPlay Dashboard. That is something that I have basically wanted since day one of CarPlay (how cool is it to have an “Errands” perspective show on my car’s screen so that I never forget to buy milk or get dog food?!)
So I applaud Ken, Ainsley, and all of the other team members for listening. With class and patience, they have been responding to not only to me, but to all of the beta testers in the Omni Slack and email channels.
Here is to the next wave of OmniFocus (and Omni apps in general) improvements.