Welcome to the OmniFocus 4 TestFlight!

To all our new testers: I do hope you all enjoy the TestFlight as you finally get your hands on it—and would also like to apologize in advance for all the rough edges at this early stage! Rebuilding the interface from scratch means there’s over a decade of code being rebuilt. A good place to look for the latest status updates are in the TestFlight Release Notes on our website.

As we rebuild the app after a decade of feedback from customers (along with our own experiences using the app), we’ve taken the opportunity to radically rethink and redesign some of the ways the app works. One of our big goals with this release was that your interaction should be centered on lists of tasks (really outlines)—not based around navigation (like the old iPhone home screen) or on inspector screens showing individual tasks. We do still have navigation to get to other lists, of course, and we do still have the inspector for batch editing and for infrequently used fields. But neither of those should be central to the experience.

Rather than constantly sending you to different screens, the notion behind this new design is that most of the common operations that you want to do—such as adding a task, editing its notes, adding attachments, setting due dates, etc.—should be possible right in the main outline. To add a note, for example, just tap on the note icon and the note field appears inline in the outline. It grows as you type, filling as much of the screen as you care to use.

To avoid overwhelming people with options, we start off with just a few commonly-used fields visible by default: title, note, due date. Like you might find in Reminders. But as your needs grow beyond those basic capabilities, you can configure additional fields to be visible right there in the main outline: adding additional fields for tags, defer dates, flagged, repeat settings, assigned project, and estimated times. All of these fields can be edited right in the main outline, without having to open up the inspector.

I hope this helps set the stage for what you’re seeing as you open up this new version of OmniFocus for the first time. You can reach us by sending email to omnifocus4-testflight@omnigroup.com or by using the Contact Omni option in Settings. We look forward to your feedback!

— Ken Case, CEO (May, 2021)