What you need to know
- OmniFocus for the Web has gained support for custom perspectives.
- The powerful custom views will sync from your other OmniFocus apps.
- But you'll still need to create them on your iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
The Omni Group has added an important feature to the web-based version of its popular task management app, OmniFocus. The newly updated OmniFocus for the Web now supports custom perspectives for the first time.
OmniFocus power users make heavy use of custom perspectives. They're saved searches of sorts and can be invaluable for plucking tasks and projects out of a huge database. And now the feature is also available via a web browser.
With custom perspectives, you can customize your own views in OmniFocus to truly make the app your own. You can set up personalized combinations of filter rules to show you the items you're most interested in, and those custom perspectives are synced to all your devices. Want to see every flagged task related to work that hasn't been completed, grouped by when you last edited those tasks? Or perhaps you want to pull up a list of everything you have finished, grouped by completion date? Or see everything in your Family folder tagged with Errand or Groceries, but not if it contains the word "egg" or belongs to a project tagged Birthday?
That last example is taking things a but too far, but that's the point. Custom perspectives can be extremely complicated and that's where their power lies.
You can't create custom perspectives on the web just yet, though. You'll still need to use your other devices for that. At least for now.
I should note that it's not yet possible to create or edit custom perspectives using the web app: that process still happens on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. We do want to support that eventually, but being able to view custom perspectives everywhere is a much higher priority than being able to edit them everywhere.
Patience, folks. It'll come. You can find more information about OmniFocus for the Web over on the service's website.
