Omnifocus Interface == Fail 1

Posted by Kurt Schrader Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:40:00 GMT

I use Omnifocus everyday to track what I'm doing, and I love it, but there are tons of UI problems with it that drive me absolutely crazy. There's a good article about some of the failings of the interface design here (with a video showing some of them), but there's one interface decision that's been absolutely driving me nuts lately.

Look at this picture:

omnicalendar

See anything wrong with it?

If you said, "There's no way to set the due date for a project to Tuesday without clicking the little arrow at the top left to go to next month" then you're right.

What a horrible failure of UI design. I end up up dealing with this at the end of every month, and everytime it's a pain in the ass. Compare it to the iCal day chooser:

ical

See that? Much better. They just grey out the days in the upcoming month. (They even go above and beyond the call of duty and show two upcoming weeks.) This is what the Omnifocus date chooser should be.

Hopefully there will be an Omnifocus update soon that addresses most of the problems with the interface. I expect more at the price point ($89) that they've positioned it at.

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    wvh 8 days later:

    Hi Kurt,

    I agree with you about the little pop-up calendar. Sadly, this is actually the standard calendar view that comes with Cocoa. So far we haven't written up our own calendar widget that works better (partially because we're hoping Apple will someday let us use the nice one that they put in iCal, instead of making us reinvent it), but I thought you might appreciate the following:

    • Maybe you already know, but you can type stuff like "tomorrow", "tuesday", "tue", or "1d" in date cells; that doesn't help if your hand is on the mouse and you want to click something, but it's pretty handy when you're typing!

    • We've written up a response to Matt Neuburg's review and videos on our blog, and responded to some other concerns in the comments section. Maybe that will help clarify why we made some of the UI decisions we did, and which problems we're working on fixing in the next version.

    • The price of OmniFocus is $79.95, not $89.

    • If you ever have any more feedback about Omni products, we'd love to hear it from you: if you use the "Send Feedback" command in the Help menu, you can be sure we'll get your comments, in case we're not monitoring the blogosphere closely enough that day. :)

    Thanks for using OmniFocus, and for noticing these kinds of things! We're listening, and we're always trying to improve the software.

    Bill

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