OmniFocus for iPhone plugs into part of the iPhone OS called “Location Services”; this lets it figure out where in the world you’re located. The location-finding is most accurate if you’re using a device that has GPS (an iPhone 3g or the new 3gs, for example), but if you’ve got a first-generation iPhone or an iPod Touch, the device can also figure out your location by seeing which cellphone towers and/or WiFi networks it can find. (WiFi is actually more accurate than the cell-tower method, at least here in the US; overseas, the situation may be different.)

Okay, this is cool and all, but how is it useful in OmniFocus? Well, your contexts can also have location information associated with them. By combining the two, OmniFocus can do Google map searches to help you figure out what you can get done based on where you currently are. Tap the “Nearby Contexts” button – it looks like a crosshair on the toolbar – and OmniFocus will show you where you can go to accomplish actions in the contexts it has location info about.

To assign location info to one of your contexts, do the following:
Tap “Contexts” on OmniFocus for iPhone’s home screen.
Tap the “Edit” button in the upper right of the screen.
Tap the context you want to edit.
Tap one of the location buttons described below and enter your information.

The various kinds of Location info supported are:

Current location – where you are right now, expressed as latitude/longitude.

Contact - The address assigned to the contact you choose is used.
Address – Enter an address. Anything that works in the iPhone Maps application works here; street address of your home, or even something as general as “Beijing, China”.
Business Search – Specific business names and general categories are both supported; OmniFocus will return the closest result it can find. If you have a favorite drug store where you get prescriptions filled, you could enter the name; if you travel a lot, you could just enter “Pharmacy” and get results in multiple cities.
Always Available – This setting is good for contexts like “Phone” – ones that are generally available no matter where you are.

In any case, once your contexts are set up, you can tap the nearby button and get a handy list that looks like this:

(A tap the button on the right side of each header takes you to the Maps application so you can navigate to the location, by the way.)

I’ve added a list of location-based contexts that folks here at Omni use to get folks started. I’ve also created a thread over on our forums where folks can swap further ideas – we’re doing a google map search behind the scenes, so using their search operators, you can do some neat tricks with this stuff!

Suggestions:
Home
Office
Phone (always available, if you’re on an iPhone)
Grocery
Pharmacy
Post Office
Music Store
Book Store
Apple Store
Cities you visit frequently

faces-v3

[Update: If you downloaded an earlier version of the script and it didn't work, try the updated one above. It handles the '~' in the iPhoto library preference now, and it avoids a problem that folks using a document style with no line head specified would encounter.]

The script makes use of the new Faces feature of iPhoto ‘09. It looks for named faces in your library, then creates an OmniGraffle document showing which ones appear in photos together. At that point, it fires off OmniGraffle’s automatic layout feature. I’ll let the script’s author, Armin Briegel, describe the results:

“It probably depends on your picture taking habits, but in my graph you can pick out families and groups of people, such as my son’s classmates. The big mess in the middle is obviously our closest friends and families. But even there the families are in close proximity to each other.”

In any case, this gets our robot-stamp of approval, so we thought other folks might want to check it out, as well. Enjoy!

More info, including directions, on the dBug site.

Q: Has there been any progress on index card printing? I’ve been checking through the New Features lists with each releases, but I haven’t seen anything relevant. Have I missed something? It would be really great if I could print to index cards nicely.

A: You can do this, but it’s not something that we mentioned in the feature list. What you want to do is set up a custom paper size, then tell OmniFocus to use that paper size when printing.

(This assumes your printer supports printing to 3×5 cards, of course.)

To set up a custom paper size, do the following:

1. Open OmniFocus
2. Select File -> Page Setup
3. In the Paper Size pop-up menu, select “Manage Custom Sizes”.
4. In the window that appears, press the plus-sign button in the lower left.
5. Double-click the new item that appears in the left column, and rename it to “3×5 Notecard”.
6. On the right side of the page, set the page width to 5 inches, and the page height to 3 inches.
7. Adjust the printer margins to taste, or leave them on the default values.
8. Press the Okay button to close the window and save your custom paper size.

You’ll now be taken back to the page setup sheet in OmniFocus. Again, assuming your printer supports printing to 3×5 cards, you can now select your custom paper size in the “Paper Size” pop-up. Press the Okay button.

Do a test print (or preview), adjust to taste, and you’re all set to take your OmniFocus info with you all pocket-sized.

It would be nice to select which tasks/projects I want to have printed out and get some more information on my piece of paper (e.g. dates).

This is pretty easy to do, and I figured other folks might want to do this as well, so up on the blog it goes!

OmniFocus has a feature called “Perspectives” which allows you to set up different views of your information that you’d like to access quickly and easily. For example, I have one perspective saved that focuses on my Support Ninja tasks and another that shows all my completed actions, which flip over to during those “when did i do that task again?” moments I occasionally have.

More importantly, I also have a “To-Go” perspective that shows the contexts for going out and running errands, but not the ones like ‘desk’, ‘office’, or ‘home’. Whenever I need a new task list, I just switch to that perspective, print my task list, and off I go.

To set this up, do the following:

Switch to context view, then set the window up as you’d like your to-go task list to look. Command-click the relevant contexts to select them, change up the view bar settings, and so forth. Get everything looking how you’d like it to look on paper.

Next, select Perspectives -> Show Perspectives Window from the menu bar. Press the “Plus” button in the lower left. Name the new perspective “To-Go”, or “Printed Task List”, or whatever you’d like.

When you set the perspective up, we add an item for it under the Perspectives menu. From now on, anytime you want to print your task list, just select that menu item and print. We’ll apply the settings you specified for you, saving you the effort of twiddling everything yourself.

Pro tip: if the Perspectives window is showing on screen, you can just select the perspective in the window, then hit the quick print button at the bottom. We’ll print your list without switching your window to that perspective.

And if you ever want to change how the printout looks, just activate the perspective, adjust how the window is set up, and press the button with the camera icon. We’ll save the new settings into your perspective for you.

(One neat trick I used this for – to use less paper, use File -> Page Setup to set the scale to something less than 100%, so you get more tasks on less paper. We’ll save that setting into the perspective, too.)

Enjoy!

(Edit: said email was circulated by Molly, our operations manager. She threatened to slap me with a plagiarism suit and/or a licensing fee unless I gave her a byline.)

Items that were moved to the garage today and are ready to be either claimed or recycled include:

• True Lies poster
• Mad Dog & Glory poster
• Episode 1 poster (framed)
• Disco Light
• Assorted Super Soakers/Nerf Guns
• Plastic Millennium Falcon
• Assorted Halloween decorations
• Assorted Halloween hats … or everyday hats if that’s how you roll
• Easel pads
• Red glass Xmas tree balls
• black leather ottoman
• sundry toys
• pots n pans
• fish tank
• broken vacuum
• broken steam cleaner
• green iMac … strangely this particular iMac also has a case?
• Fixin’s for a fountain
• Robotics set
• Xmas tree stand
• lightbulbs
• car cleaning supplies
• box ‘o bar clamps, hammers, and other sundry tools

So there you have it. A little slice of OmniLife, as in the slice that’s full of the stuff that we stick in an attic for ten years, cover with dust and the detritus that comes with repairing the roof without moving said items (getting roof-crud all over them), and finally just giving it all to a nice company that promises to recycle as much of this stuff as can possibly be recycled.

Fear our packratting, for it is legend.

1. Development team produces build of application OmniFoo they’re mostly happy with.
2. Marketing Weasel writes press release, webmaster nee Web Editor updates site with brand-new OmniFoo Beta page. We push new version of website.
3. VersionTracker, etc. pick up on new build.
4. Support Ninjas are crushed under a big pile of electronic mail for the next three months. All that is heard from them is a soft but desperate honking noise. Think baby penguin at the bottom of a deep ice-crevasse.

This has a couple of negative effects: first of all, when you’re buried in raw oscillating electrons up to your neck, it’s really hard on the skin; not at all like that ‘drink from the glowy pool of water’ scene in Tron would have you believe.More seriously: we get plenty of eyeballs on the new application, which is a good thing. Unfortunately we also got all those eyeballs on the new app at the exact same time. So that thing that’s forehead-smackingly obviously broken (which, of course, we failed to catch in the gajillions of hours we spent staring at the app before we pushed it out) gets reported 200 times.Now, the first report of an issue? Good. The tenth? Gold – then we know that this isn’t random gremlin activity; there is something here we need to figure out. This holds up till, oh, somewhere between 30 and 50 reports. Beyond that, it’s a problem we know about, that we know we need to fix, but from there on out the additional utility of the reports drops off fast. The time it takes the Ninjas to process them doesn’t, however.Result: stressed-out ninjas, frustrated engineers (because they’re not getting reports of the problems in the newest builds; we’re still looking at launch day reports), and the folks with the test builds are having to wade through issues that we haven’t fixed because we’re still sorting and writing up reports.In short, it works, but it’s painful for everyone involved. So this time, we did something better. Process this time:

1. A couple months before we’re ready to start testing, let folks know we’ll be ready to start testing in a couple months. Set up an email list to join if they’d like to participate.
2. Produce build of application we’re ready to start testing.
3. Make build available to some of the folks on said list.
4. Fix the problems they find, including forehead-smackers.
5. Return to step 3, above.

Advantages: Many. We get feedback in manageable quantities. Testers get fixes that bear some resemblance to their reports. Support ninjas get fewer ulcers. World shares cola beverage, sings in perfect harmony.What do we need to do differently next time? To begin with, we need to give customers the ability to help us prioritize their mail, by at the very least sorting it into “bug report”, “feature request”, and “oh god, where is my download login” buckets. The other thing? If we choose to implement any more apps based on the current 800-pound gorilla of personal productivity methodologies, I’m just going to start hiring and never, ever stop. Which, of course, provides me with a perfect opportunity to link point interested parties over to our Want Work? page, newly updated as of yesterday.

Our sysadmin is working on untangling exactly what happened. To anyone that sent us support mail: please accept our apologies for the inconvenience this caused. We’d also like to ask you to re-send the messages that bounced back to you. We’ll get your mail processed and get responses back to you as soon as possible.