Simplicity Is Bliss

If you happen to work in a large corporation like I do, chances are high that you need to integrate with a Microsoft Exchange environment. Dependent on how flexible and open your IT department is you can do this using IMAP or you need to go native Microsoft. In the latter case you’ll hopefully be using Outlook for Mac 2011. If you still want to integrate with your trusted OmniFocus task management, Veritrope’s new AppleScript for Outlook 2011 to OmniFocus has you covered.

This script will send any type of Outlook item/items (messages, tasks, notes, calendar items, and contacts) directly to OmniFocus’s Inbox — and even will make a new task item from a highlighted bit of text. If there is existing due date information associated with the item, that should also make the jump as well. And if you have Growl installed, you’ll receive notifications that give you status updates as Items are added.

The script is still in its early stages, but I am sure that with a little help from its user base it’ll be a perfect companion.

It’s always great if two of your favorite applications go out and have a drink together. These two needed a little help and @binaryghost showed them how to date in his post about “Use Alfred to add tasks to OmniFocus”. Creating a customer search in Alfred makes it possible to trigger OmniFocus through it’s URI scheme.

I don’t like the fact that the added tasks doesn’t go straight to the inbox but instead pops-up in OmniFocus Quick Entry. Hence this may only be helpful for those of you that have difficulties to remember keyboard short-cuts or simply ran out of memorable ones because you have all these apps that like to have global short-cuts. And boy, I can see cases for both from own experience.

In the third and final part of David Sparks screen cast series “OmniFocus Ninja Tricks”, you see David providing again good overview to OmniFocus’ standard functionality. It’s not so much about geeking out with OmniFocus, but it gets you to master all the basics. I can’t recommend this enough to people who are new to OmniFocus or just didn’t have the 360° overview yet.

In this final episode of the OmniFocus Screencast trilogy, David covers task completion, review, and additional customization and database maintenance. The screencast is in AppleTV format and looks great on your Mac, iPad, and AppleTV. This episode has a small overscan so it plays better on the AppleTV. Enjoy.”

Also don’t miss episode one on capturing and episode two on processing tasks of this great series. The videos come in handy AppleTV format, which allows you to watch them in good quality nearly on every Apple device.

Here is a great and detailed description about a monthly routine on how to trim some fat from your OmniFocus database & speed up syncing. We all sometimes suffer from bloated database files that make the synchronisation process take longer than required. Although the OmniGroup has invested heavily to improve sync speeds (and they certainly succeeded bug time), there is still some risk that you synchronise more than you actually need.

So, here’s  my monthly OmniFocus compacting routine which keeps the size of my database small, and speeds up the opening of OmniFocus on my iPhone. I have shaved MBs of my database in the past, as a matter of fact, the first time I did this whole process I reduced my database from 21 MB to 750 KB. That said, I now probably reduce it by about 75% (from ~600KB down to ~150KB)

The post covers basic such as ‘Moving Old Data to Archive’, but also provides a step by step instruction on how reduce the site of the database that is synchronised. Make sure you do a backup of your OmniFocus database first and use the process at your own risk.

David Sparks, aka @MacSparky, of Mac Power User Podcast fame and author of the ‘Mac at Work’ book has been planning and talking about doing OmniFocus screen casts for some time. Since last Friday the first of three episodes is out and available for watching and downloading on the Mac Power User website. The download comes in handy in case you want to watch the 20 minute piece on the go.

In episode one David talks about getting stuff into OmniFocus and hence covers all type of different methods of capturing. Matches quite nicely with my recent post on ‘Reviewing Your Productivity System: Capture’. Kudos to David for having pulled off such a great screen cast. Looking forward to the remaining two episodes.

Rob Trew, one of the most active AppleScript developers on the OmniFocus forums, has released a quite comprehensive script that allows you to import all your Things data into OmniFocus. While Rob’s work usually is bullet-proof, you don’t want to put your task list at risk when using this script, so backup you stuff before using this.

Many currently switch as Things by CulturedCode is lagging behind on Over-The-Air (OTA) Sync capabilities, something that OmniFocus has for a long time (actually running of a “simple” Mac mini server, if you use OmniGroup’s free sync service). While CulturedCode is coming out with OTA slowly, quite some rants and cynicism has hit the guys from my city in Germany, Stuttgart, in the last months. But hey, it’s a open market and they need to compete in it and admit that they didn’t understand the importance of OTA sync to users early enough.

But honestly, I believe that Things and OmniFocus target two different types of customers as the applications, underlying approach and feature set is just too different. For whatever reason you might be changing, I am sure that Rob’s script will make it much easier for you.

With about every second post I typically get asked which icons I use for my Perspectives in OmniFocus and I’ve tried my best to answer the question every single time. However, I thought a “official” post might be helpful as well. While I mentioned Glyphish as a nice icon set for use in OmniFocus before, that love affair was a relatively short one and I came back to my standard icon set very quickly: WooCons #1 by WooThemes.

It a very nice, nearly classical set of icons originally purposed to be used in web applications and sites. However, amongst the 170 icons are nice fits for nearly every Perspective you could think of. As they ship as 32x32 pixel PNGs they are also perfectly suited to be directly dropped into OmninFocus’ Perspective Settings.

Thanks to Janik Baumgartner for designing this beauty.

Sparrow, the new and already popular native Mac client for GMail gained basic AppleScript support in its latest version. The AppleScript wizards like Don Southard (aka @binaryghost) have already picked it up and created some level of integration with OmniFocus.

In his post “Delegate a Task in OmniFocus with Sparrow” Don introduces an AppleScript that allows you to delegate tasks from within OmniFocus using Sparrow.

My favorite email integration though, adding Waiting For eMails to OmniFocus, which requires linking back to emails, won’t work in Sparrow until it has support for a customer URI scheme (e.g. “sparrow://”).