I actually posted this to our website last week, but forgot to post this on the blog. Go me!We've had a tremendous response to OmniFocus, and despite bringing on two support ninjas over the last year to help out with it, we're still struggling. Frankly, that sucks. Solution: more hiring!Visit our jobs page for more information.
Got another question from a customer which I thought other folks might be interested in, so up on the blog it goes!
Q: Has there been any progress on index card printing? I've been checking through the New Features lists with each releases, but I haven't seen anything relevant. Have I missed something? It would be really great if I could print to index cards nicely.
A: You can do this, but it's not something that we mentioned in the feature list. What you want to do is set up a custom paper size, then tell OmniFocus to use that paper size when printing.
(This assumes your printer supports printing to 3x5 cards, of course.)
To set up a custom paper size, do the following:
You'll now be taken back to the page setup sheet in OmniFocus. Again, assuming your printer supports printing to 3x5 cards, you can now select your custom paper size in the “Paper Size” pop-up. Press the Okay button.
Do a test print (or preview), adjust to taste, and you're all set to take your OmniFocus info with you all pocket-sized.
Last week, your humble support ninja got this in an email from a customer:
It would be nice to select which tasks/projects I want to have printed out and get some more information on my piece of paper (e.g. dates).
This is pretty easy to do, and I figured other folks might want to do this as well, so up on the blog it goes!
OmniFocus has a feature called “Perspectives” which allows you to set up different views of your information that you'd like to access quickly and easily. For example, I have one perspective saved that focuses on my Support Ninja tasks and another that shows all my completed actions, which flip over to during those “when did i do that task again?” moments I occasionally have.
More importantly, I also have a “To-Go” perspective that shows the contexts for going out and running errands, but not the ones like 'desk', 'office', or 'home'. Whenever I need a new task list, I just switch to that perspective, print my task list, and off I go.
To set this up, do the following:
Switch to context view, then set the window up as you'd like your to-go task list to look. Command-click the relevant contexts to select them, change up the view bar settings, and so forth. Get everything looking how you'd like it to look on paper.
Next, select Perspectives -> Show Perspectives Window from the menu bar. Press the “Plus” button in the lower left. Name the new perspective “To-Go”, or “Printed Task List”, or whatever you'd like.
When you set the perspective up, we add an item for it under the Perspectives menu. From now on, anytime you want to print your task list, just select that menu item and print. We'll apply the settings you specified for you, saving you the effort of twiddling everything yourself.
Pro tip: if the Perspectives window is showing on screen, you can just select the perspective in the window, then hit the quick print button at the bottom. We'll print your list without switching your window to that perspective.
And if you ever want to change how the printout looks, just activate the perspective, adjust how the window is set up, and press the button with the camera icon. We'll save the new settings into your perspective for you.
(One neat trick I used this for - to use less paper, use File -> Page Setup to set the scale to something less than 100%, so you get more tasks on less paper. We'll save that setting into the perspective, too.)
Enjoy!
So, Omni's been here for a while, and in that time, we've accumulated a bunch of… stuff. For your edification and delight on this All Hallows' Eve, I quote you this 100% real email which was circulated today.
(Edit: said email was circulated by Molly, our operations manager. She threatened to slap me with a plagiarism suit and/or a licensing fee unless I gave her a byline.)
Items that were moved to the garage today and are ready to be either claimed or recycled include:
So there you have it. A little slice of OmniLife, as in the slice that's full of the stuff that we stick in an attic for ten years, cover with dust and the detritus that comes with repairing the roof without moving said items (getting roof-crud all over them), and finally just giving it all to a nice company that promises to recycle as much of this stuff as can possibly be recycled.
Fear our packratting, for it is legend.
Linda asked lil' ol' me to provide the second post in our ongoing OmniFocus: What We've Learned So Far series. Whether she will come to regret this, only time can tell. Without further ado, the post beginneth thusly:Okay, I'm long-winded; sue me. Before I can really tell you how well the OmniFocus test process is going, though, I feel like I have to supply a bit of background on how we've handled this process for previous projects. It went a little something like this:
For approximately 12 hours, starting last night at 10pm Pacific Daylight Time, the trouble ticket system we use was malfunctioning - mail to our support addresses was bounced back to the folks that sent it without being added to our support queues. We can see that folks sent us mail, but the actual contents of that mail was lost.
Our sysadmin is working on untangling exactly what happened. To anyone that sent us support mail: please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this caused. We'd also like to ask you to re-send the messages that bounced back to you. We'll get your mail processed and get responses back to you as soon as possible.
Just wanted to say thanks to everyone participating in the OmniFocus alpha. We're getting tons of good feedback. The graph below shows the number of items we have in our system, broken out by product. See the blue line? That's OmniFocus. Red line? OmniWeb. Green line? OmniPlan. Nothing else even makes it onto the chart right now. If it takes us a while to respond to you, now you know why.
