Omni Roadmap 2025: OmniFocus 4 Highlights

Announcements

Earlier today, Omni Group CEO Ken Case shared Omni Roadmap 2025. This post continues the annual tradition of celebrating highlights from the past year and provides a peek at what’s in store for the year ahead. Here are some OmniFocus-specific highlights based on Ken’s post.

Highlights From 2024

Before looking to the future, I’d like to acknowledge Omni’s progress in 2024. Apple also recognized Omni’s significant strides by including OmniFocus 4 for Mac among the Apple App Store Awards finalists.

Notable changes and additions in 2024 include launching OmniFocus on Apple Vision Pro, adding new perspective rules (I find the “Has date in range” rule particularly helpful) and adding support for Focus Filters. OmniFocus also gained support for lock screen controls, tinted home screens and Apple Watch double-tap gestures. Recently, Omni enhanced OmniFocus by adding Mac appearance settings and new actions to Shortcuts.

Omni Automation received some attention as well. I particularly appreciate the ability to create install links. Most plug-ins in our OmniFocus Plug-In Directory and the Omni Automation website can be installed with a single click or tap. Thanks of the efforts of Sal Soghoian, Kaitlin Salzke and others, you can effectively add new features to OmniFocus without any programming knowledge.

OmniFocus for the Web also got some upgrades, including a refreshed appearance and new view and sidebar options.

Kanban

Omni plans to add a Kanban view to OmniFocus. 🎉 Kanban is a Japanese word (看板) roughly translating to “card you can see” or “signboard.” The use of Kanban as a visual management method stems from the lean manufacturing system that was refined and adopted by Toyota. While it can be very useful to view tasks as a list, it will also be beneficial to have tasks represented by cards on a board, especially for visually oriented people.

I look forward to sharing details and specific use cases once the Kanban feature has been added to OmniFocus.

Defer, Due and Do Dates

I’ve always appreciated that OmniFocus supports both defer and due dates.

A defer date specifies when a project, action, or action group will become available. The implication is that you can’t work on the task until that date and time. For example, if I’d like to buy concert tickets and they don’t go on sale until Tuesday at 09:00, it doesn’t make sense to see a “Buy concert tickets” action among my available actions until Tuesday at 09:00 arrives.

When used appropriately, due dates can be very helpful for tracking a commitment to complete something by a specific date and time. For example, if I promised to send some information to a client by Friday at 17:00, I could set a due date and time for Friday. In practice, I would probably set the due date to Friday at 14:00 to allow for some buffer.

There’s a third type of date. Let’s say you have a project to build your dog a new home that contains a “purchase supplies from Home Depot” action. You don’t plan to go to Home Depot until Saturday, but you still want this action to be available if you happen to be in the neighbourhood before the weekend. If you defer the action to Saturday, it won’t become available to work on until Saturday. And if you don’t defer it, it could clutter up your system by showing you things you don’t plan to do until the weekend.

Omni is considering adding a “do” or “schedule” date field. Returning to the previous example, you could schedule your task for Saturday without deferring it to Saturday. Presumably, OmniFocus would provide a mechanism allowing you to hide tasks scheduled for a future date while still considering them “available.” So, you could have a location trigger remind you to stop at Home Depot if you drove past on a Friday, even though this action was scheduled for Saturday.

In the meantime, one of my favourite OmniFocus plug-ins is Scheduling by Kaitlin Salzke. It cleverly uses tags to earmark activities for future dates. You’ll find it in our OmniFocus Plug-In Directory.

Mutually Exclusive Tags

I find it very helpful to group related tags. For example, I have a tag called “Communications” with nested tags of “Email,” “Phone,” and “Message.” If I had an action such as “Contact Ken about Omni Roadmap,” I might initially assign it a “Phone” tag to add to my list of phone calls. If it gets too late in the day to call, I might opt to remove “Phone” and put “Email” in its place.

Omni is looking at the possibility of supporting mutually exclusive tags. This mechanism would automatically remove a tag when another from the same group is applied. For example, if I changed “Phone” to “Email,” OmniFocus would automatically remove the “Phone” tag, as it doesn’t make sense to have an action tagged with both “Phone” and “Email.”

With a bit of effort, you can have this functionality today using Josh Hughes’ collection of Toggle Tags plug-ins. You’ll find an overview of these plug-ins in the OmniFocus Plug-In Directory.

Document Links

A productivity system is comprised of a variety of tools, including a task manager, calendar, note-taking app and file-management system, that work together to help you deliver on whatever you’re bringing into being, whether it’s a Q2 report or a relaxing vacation in Hawaii. Linking apps and data together essentially creates what I call the “ultimate productivity app.” Each app is a component of a larger system, and everything is interconnected.

I was pleased (and not surprised) to see Omni embrace the Manifesto for Ubiquitous Linking, an initiative by my fellow British Columbian, Luc Beaudoin. I’ve supported this approach from the beginning and am among the signatories.

Omni Roadmap 2025 includes an overview of “document links” planned for OmniFocus and Omni’s other apps, including OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner. Instead of importing a static file, you can use a document link to refer to the file. You can store this document wherever you like, for example, on iCloud Drive, Dropbox or Google Drive.

If you’d like linking capabilities right away, check out Hookmark. This clever app is available directly from the developer and as part of a Setapp subscription. I’ve featured Hookmark many times on Learn OmniFocus (and it will be featured in the upcoming “Taming Email with OmniFocus 4” course). See the Hookmark page in the OmniFocus App Directory for an overview of how Hookmark can be used with OmniFocus. This page also includes links to related Learn OmniFocus content.

Apple Intelligence

Omni is closely monitoring Apple’s rollout of Apple Intelligence features.

Omni has already added nouns and verbs to OmniFocus and its other apps. In the short term, these additions are already helpful for creating shortcut automations using Apple’s Shortcuts app. We continue to highlight some use cases in our content library.

These same nouns and verbs can be used by future iterations of Apple Intelligence to provide secure, on-device automations that don’t require the creation of shortcuts. I expect we’ll learn more at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June 2025.

Thanks, Omni!

Many thanks to the talented folks at Omni, who continue to develop outstanding products that benefit many people, myself included. As a former software engineer, I know how much time and energy goes into creating quality software and appreciate Omni’s dedication to its products and customers.

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