With its clean and uncluttered interface, OmniFocus 2 for Mac brings all the power you’ve come to expect and puts your projects and actions front and center. Even with the shiny new interface, we kept the original data format, so OmniFocus 2 syncs just fine not only with OmniFocus 2 for iPhone, but all three editions of OmniFocus 1 as well. OmniFocus 2 requires Mac OS X 10.9.2 or higher.
Standard and Pro
OmniFocus Standard provides the core functionality most folks need to get things done in a straightforward manner.
OmniFocus Pro adds power tools for those who like to tune and customize their productivity system: Custom Perspectives, Focus, and AppleScript.
Perspectives
- Perspectives now hang out in tabs on the left edge of the window. We hand-crafted several perspectives for your convenience.
- Projects, Contexts, and Inbox perspectives are similar to the OmniFocus 1 views they descended from, but have redesigned View Options.
- Forecast is a new date-centric perspective for viewing your actions and Calendar events together, to keep your schedule in balance.
- Review is a new perspective optimized to help you zip through the weekly(?) review you try to remember to do.
- Completed and Changed perspectives offer a historical view of your data.
Other Design Changes
- Status Circles provide a colorful nexus of information about each task: is it overdue, flagged, complete, repeating?
- Quick Open lets you jump to any project, context, or perspective you can name, from a single keyboard shortcut.
- A guided first launch experience to help you get off on the right synced foot.
- Revised some terminology:
- “start date” → “defer date”
- “next action” → “first available”
- Preferences got a make-over. Outlining behaviors for Escape, Return, and other keys in the main outline default to the New-Fangled (aka “Modern") set, but if you prefer the tried-and-true OmniFocus 1 behavior, you can opt for “Classic Mode” in the General Preferences. Default defer time is also customizable.
- Inspectors are now embedded in the window, so you can keep all the details together, especially in full screen.
Behind the Scenes
- The Anonymizer crafts a copy of your database with item names and notes replaced with X’s and such, for those times when we really need to see the structure of your database to chase down a particularly elusive bug.
- Deep adoption of modern Apple technologies, poised for whatever they announce next.
- AppleScript: While we’ve tried to maintain backwards compatibility where possible, some changes were necessary, particularly in terminology referring to user interface elements.
- Backups are now limited to 100 and automatically discarded as newer ones are created.
