![]() On my iPad, I have two apps sporting OmniFocus integration: Instapaper and Mr. ![]() No, you can’t just send stuff in the background on iOS. But right now, we’re stuck with a few (great) apps supporting OmniFocus in the way you can select something, send it to OF, and watch the multitasking animation taking you from one app to another. Perhaps we’ll get there in the next couple of years. Wouldn’t it be great to add tasks to OmniFocus from any application – no matter what you’re doing, just hit a button and send an item into the database? Wouldn’t it be nice to have ubiquitous OmniFocus support in the apps we use on a daily basis without having to struggle with add-ons and plugins? Yes, it would be – especially if Apple allowed developers to easily plug into others devs’ applications or have a proper Services menu for iOS that took care of managing information and data across the system without launching apps. This aspect of OmniFocus isn’t as advanced as I wish it was, but I think developers are slowly getting there. There are variations of the OmniFocus bookmarklet floating around on the Internet, but I recommend using the official one as it works everywhere, on any platform. But because iOS devices can’t open a Quick Entry panel on top of Safari, you’ll be brought to the app with the aforementioned fields (note, title) already filled in. But there’s more: as the bookmarklet follows the “omnifocus://” URI scheme shared across OS X and iOS, the little browser button will work on your Mac, as well as the iPhone and iPad. And because the boomarklet is smart, any selection you make on a webpage will be saved as a note alongside the URL in your newly created action. With the bookmarklet, OmniFocus takes care of extracting a webpage’s title and link and embed them in the action panel for you – no need to manually pasting URLs or grabbing the page title for reference. Provided by The Omni Group itself, the “Send to OmniFocus” browser bookmarklet offers an efficient way to save webpages with literally two clicks. The most obvious way to add actions to OmniFocus from outside the app is the bookmarklet. While this is not possible today – but I have a pretty good feeling The Omni Group is considering it for future updates – there are ways to quickly create tasks outside of the main OmniFocus environment and save them in seconds.Īfter the break, I take a look at some of the tools I’ve been using to add actions in my OmniFocus using an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. Or, there could be a way to send an action quickly to OmniFocus’ cloud server, without having to open OmniFocus at all. And as much as I love the iOS versions of OmniFocus, there’s always something that bothers me when I’m in a hurry but I need to get some actions saved quickly: as others have outlined before, I think I’d really enjoy a “mini OmniFocus” that’s exclusively aimed at entering tasks in seconds without loading the entire database. That’s an interesting concept: as OmniFocus can be integrated with OS X, accessed to from a web browser or even linked to by other apps, there are ways to quickly get items into it without following the usual pattern of opening the app + writing down a new action, or launching the desktop Quick Entry window manually. Over the past weeks, however, rather than reading tutorials on how to get the most out of OmniFocus or learning about other users’ setups (something that I usually love to do, by the way, as my Instapaper queue can prove), I decided to play around with tools and utilities provided by The Omni Group to customize the way you can get actions into OmniFocus without actually using OmniFocus. ![]() ![]() With an update to the iPhone app around the corner and a major 2.0 update for the Mac coming out sometime in the next months, there’s plenty of features to look forward to. If you’ve been reading MacStories in the past few months, you know we care about the latest OmniFocus updates and new features implemented by the developers, but more importantly we, like many others, have fallen in love with the iPad version of OmniFocus, which contrary to expectations has turned out to be a great portable counterpart that retains most of the functionalities of the desktop OF without sacrificing usability – actually adding new intuitive schemes, navigation options, and more. It is no secret I’m a big fan of The Omni Group’s OmniFocus for Mac and iOS, as over time it has become my “trusted system” (as people like to call great applications you can rely on nowadays) to organize actions (tasks), contexts and, in general, stuff I have to do and don’t want to forget about. ![]()
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