Archive for the ‘omnifocus’ Category

Due date bug in OmniFocus

July 23rd, 2009 at 4:08 pm

A new version of OmniFocus for the iPhone, version 1.5.2, showed up in the App Store yesterday. In addition to bug fixes, it has a few new and changed features. One of the changes is the default due time, which has been moved from 8:00 am (I think that’s what it was) to 5:00 pm. This happens to be the due time I use most often, so it’s a welcome change. But it’s not quite as useful as I thought it would be.

Let’s say you’re entering a new task that you’d like to complete by the end of the day. You put in the description, project, and context

and then tap the due line to enter the date and time.

Because of the new default, the date and time are already set to exactly what you want. So you tap the Save button, which takes you back to the previous screen,

and you find that it’s literally the previous screen—the due date is still set to “None.” What happened? Well, take a look at the Start & Due Dates screen again. The due date up at the top of the screen starts at None, and it will stay that way unless and until you fiddle with the dials. So the only way to get the default due date is to roll one of the dials away from the default and then back to it.

This is a poor design choice by Omni. If you tapped the due line in the New Inbox Item screen, it should be assumed that you want to set the due date. The due line in Start & Due Dates screen should start out with the default value, not None. After all, what’s the point of having a good default value if to fiddle with the dials anyway?

It’s possible that OmniFocus has always worked this way when setting the due date—because the previous default was never what I wanted, I never used the default before.

Update 7/24/09
I started a thread on this topic at the OmniFocus forum. Apparently, OmniFocus has worked this way for a while, and other users have been bothered by it, too. Ken Case of Omni thinks our complaints/suggestions are reasonable and will look into changing the behavior. That’s encouraging, and it’s nice to get a prompt response.

The thread also contains a comment from user Greg Jones about similar behavior in setting due dates in OmniFocus for the Mac:

It might be worth mentioning that this behavior is not limited to the iPhone. The behavior on the Mac side is even more bizarre. If you create a task on the Mac side by clicking on the small column calendar icon, the pop-up calendar has today’s date is highlighted and the due time is pre-filled with the default value. The due date field in the column shows the current date, suggesting that this is the value that will be entered.

Hitting return dismisses the pop-up calendar and the due date field changes back to blank. What’s worse, you can bring it up as I just described, change the due time, and the date/time value is still not entered into the due date field unless you also click on a date in the calendar.

For some reason, I hadn’t run into this issue before, but it works (or fails to work) just as described. As with the iPhone problem, forcing the user to edit the value regardless of what it is defeats the purpose of having a default.

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Post #873 in iphone, omnifocus | No Comments

Jott and OmniFocus update

January 26th, 2009 at 9:50 am

Reader Erik Courtney recently informed me that my Jott to OmniFocus script had stopped working. The script scans the email that Jott sends you, grabs the bit that you dictated, and turns that into an OmniFocus task. Sometime in the past few months—after I left Jott for Dial2Do—Jott changed the format of their email and the script broke.

With Erik’s help, I was able to trace the problem. Jott’s messages now put the dictated text in the second paragraph of the message instead of the third. So the fix was to simply change Line 39 of the script from

39:        set theText to paragraph 3 of theContent

to

39:        set theText to paragraph 2 of theContent

The page that fully explains the script has been updated with this new information.

Scripts like this are inherently fragile, because they depend on other people continuing to do things the way they’ve done them in the past. The screen scraping program I wrote to grab the song lists from Mark Lamarr’s BBC radio shows is just as fragile; when the BBC web monkeys decide to modernize their page layout—which, apart from having XHTML break tags (<br />) instead of HTML break tags (<br>), looks like it was written by a 15-year-old web designer in 1996—my script will break and will have to be rewritten.

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Post #624 in omnifocus, productivity, programming | No Comments

OmniFocus command for Dial2Do

October 23rd, 2008 at 9:28 am

One of the things that made Jott easier for me to use than Dial2Do was that Jott needed one less step to add a task to OmniFocus1. Jott starts by asking “Who do do want to Jott?” and after accepting my answer of “Focus,” I can start recording my task. Dial2Do, on the other hand, starts by asking “What would you like to do?” I have to answer “Email” and then wait for another prompt before telling it that I want to email “Focus.” A small thing, but the extra step was a barrier to my use of Dial2Do. After all, I have OmniFocus on my iPhone and can enter tasks directly into it; the reason I’d use Dial2Do instead is speed. The delay associated with the extra step reduced the value of Dial2Do. (Jott’s value was reduced when it went out of beta and started charging for emails.)

As of a few days ago, Dial2Do added a new feature that allows it to work as smoothly as Jott. You can add new commands that make emailing a particular address a one-step operation. Here (apart from the fake address) is the form I filled out to create a new “focus” command:

Now when I answer “focus” to Dial2Do’s “What would you like to do?”, I can start dictating without having to answer another question. The transcribed message is sent to my “+omnifocus” address, and a combination of a Mail filter and an AppleScript (described here) puts it into my OmniFocus Inbox.

The Icon URL I gave is http://www.omnigroup.com/images/icons/128/omnifocus.png. This puts the OmniFocus icon with the “focus” command on my Dial2Do homepage—not something that’s particularly valuable to me, as I don’t go to the Dial2Do homepage much, but a nice touch.

I imagine that if you used the Dial2Do homepage, and you wanted to set up commands for emailing people, having their photos on the homepage would be helpful.

  1. Using Jott to create OmniFocus tasks is described here; using Dial2Do is described here ↩

Post #502 in mac, omnifocus, productivity | No Comments

Dial2Do and OmniFocus

August 25th, 2008 at 10:17 pm

The comments in this post at Lifehacker led me to look into Dial2Do, a service similar to Jott that transcribes your voice messages and emails them to you. Unlike Jott, Dial2Do still sends emails for free, so I decided to give it a try and rework my Jott2OmniFocus AppleScript to handle emails from Dial2Do.

The setup at Dial2Do is basically the same as that at Jott: I created a contact with the name “focus” and an email address of the form “johndoe+omnifocus@gmail.com.” I modified the Mail Rule that handles addresses sent to the “+omnifocus” address. The rule, which used to run the Jott2OmniFocus script, now runs a similar script called Dial2Do2OmniFocus. Both scripts are slightly reworked versions of the script supplied with OmniFocus to handle emailed tasks.

Here’s Dial2Do2OmniFocus:

 1:  -- Copyright 2007 The Omni Group.  All rights reserved.
 2:  --
 3:  -- $Header: svn+ssh://source.omnigroup.com/Source/svn/Omni/branches/OmniFocus/1.x/OmniGroup/Applications/Focus/App/Preferences/MailAction.applescript 100519 2008-05-15 21:12:32Z bungi $
 4:  
 5:  using terms from application "Mail"
 6:    -- Trims "foo <foo@bar.com>" down to "foo@bar.com"
 7:    on trim_address(theAddress)
 8:      try
 9:        set AppleScript's text item delimiters to "<"
10:        set WithoutPrefix to item 2 of theAddress's text items
11:        set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ">"
12:        set MyResult to item 1 of WithoutPrefix's text items
13:      on error
14:        set MyResult to theAddress
15:      end try
16:      set AppleScript's text item delimiters to {""} --> restore delimiters to default value
17:      return MyResult
18:    end trim_address
19:    
20:    
21:    on process_message(theMessage)
22:      tell application "OmniFocus"
23:        log "OmniFocus calling process_message in Dial2Do2OmniFocus script"
24:      end tell
25:      -- Allow the user to type in the full sender address in case our trimming logic doesn't handle the address they are using.
26:      set theSender to sender of theMessage
27:      set trimmedSender to my trim_address(theSender)
28:      tell application "OmniFocus"
29:        set AllowedSender to allowed mail senders
30:        if AllowedSender does not contain trimmedSender and AllowedSender does not contain theSender then
31:          beep
32:          return
33:        end if
34:      end tell
35:      
36:      set messageText to the content of theMessage as text
37:      set theTask to paragraph 1 of messageText
38:      tell application "OmniFocus"
39:        tell default document
40:          parse tasks with transport text theTask without as single task
41:        end tell
42:      end tell
43:    end process_message
44:    
45:    on perform mail action with messages theMessages
46:      try
47:        set theMessageCount to count of theMessages
48:        repeat with theMessageIndex from 1 to theMessageCount
49:          my process_message(item theMessageIndex of theMessages)
50:        end repeat
51:      on error m number n
52:        tell application "OmniFocus"
53:          log "Exception in Mail action: (" & n & ") " & m
54:        end tell
55:      end try
56:    end perform mail action with messages
57:  end using terms from

There are only two differences between this script and the Jott version:

  1. The log command in Line 23 now indicates that the OmniFocus task is coming from Dial2Do2OmniFocus.
  2. The task text is taken from the first paragraph of the email body (Line 37) instead of the third. Dial2Do puts the meat at the top of the message instead of in the middle the way Jott does.

That’s it! With those two small changes, Dial2Do messages sent to “focus” will show up in my OmniFocus Inbox for further processing.

If this post seems short on details, it’s because the steps for setting up Dial2Do for OmniFocus are almost exactly the same as those for setting up Jott for OmniFocus. See my Jott and OmniFocus post to fill in the gaps.

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Post #462 in mac, omnifocus, productivity | No Comments

Jott out of beta—goodbye free email

August 20th, 2008 at 11:20 pm

If you haven’t heard already, Jott is now out of beta and will begin charging for some of its services. Most important for me, the emailing of Jotts will be part of the fee-based services, which means I either have to pay $4/month or give up my Jott to OmniFocus system.

The new Jott will have 3 tiers of service:

The Jott application for the iPhone will still be free. When it first came out, I was puzzled why it created only online notes, not emails. Now I understand that it was only meant to integrate with the free service.

I’m not mad—Jott provides a real service and there’s nothing wrong with them getting paid for it. If you don’t have an iPhone—or other smartphone—it could be well worth the money1. I am a bit annoyed that I started Jotting my tasks to OmniFocus so late in the game. As a beta user, I can still take advantage of the full service for free until September 8, but I don’t see myself using it after that.

For me, the great thing about Jott was the email delivery. I never used the online notes—and never would have used Jott if it had only offered online notes—because they created one more inbox I’d have to check and process. Since I already have to check my email, Jott’s emails fit in nicely with an already-established pattern.

Is Jott’s email service worth $4/month? When I’m off on a business trip, as I am now, I may do 2-3 Jotts a day, but when I’m home, it’s 2-3 per week at most, not all of which are directed to OmniFocus. Given that Jotting is only incrementally more efficient than

there’s no compelling reason to add Jott to my monthly expenses. Adieu, Jott.

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  1. The $13/month plan strikes me as way overpriced no matter how much you use Jott. It seems designed to suck money from companies whose executives demand every little perk they can get their hands on. ↩

Post #458 in omnifocus, productivity | No Comments

MobileMe for me?

August 17th, 2008 at 9:12 am

As I mentioned in this post, I stopped using my trial MobileMe subscription a couple of weeks ago when I learned that OmniFocus had fixed its WebDAV support and I could sync my desktop and iPhone task lists using another server. Now I’m going to go back to MobileMe for a while.

I’m trying to look at the pros and cons before deciding whether to keep my MobileMe subscription. Here’s what I have so far:

As everyone has said of both MobileMe and its predecessor, .Mac, the sticking point is the price. If MobileMe were half the price, it would be well worth it for the convenience. I’ll give it a month or so and then revisit my pros and cons.

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Due dates in OmniFocus

August 15th, 2008 at 9:47 am

Yesterday I discovered what I think is a bug in OmniFocus’s handling of due dates in sequential projects. I’m sure Omni can defend the choice they made, but it still seems wrong to me.

Let me start by saying that this bug, if it is one, doesn’t really affect me, because I almost never use due dates. I found it as I was going through several viewing scenarios while writing this post.

The bug arises when assigning a due date to a task in a sequential project. Sequential projects are those that have to be done step by step: first task before second, second before third, etc. Sequential projects are contrasted with parallel projects, in which the tasks can be done in any order.

If you assign a due date to one of the later tasks in a sequential project, the due dates of the tasks that fall before it remain unassigned. My first guess was that OmniFocus was going to automatically assign that same due date to the preceding tasks. Failing that, I expected some warning or alert telling me that due dates were needed on these other tasks. Neither happened.

There are two reasons I think this is a bug: First, its just logical that if Task 3 of a sequential project is due next Monday, then Tasks 1 and 2 are also due by, at the latest, Monday. Second, the practical problem with the current behavior is that Tasks 1 and 2 will not show up when I look at actions that are Due Soon.

I nosed around in the Omni Forums for the reasoning behind this behavior, but didn’t find anything. Perhaps Omni thinks automatic assigning of due dates is too intrusive, that users should have the freedom to do whatever they want with their tasks, regardless of logic.

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Post #455 in mac, omnifocus, productivity | No Comments

Looking at OmniFocus

August 14th, 2008 at 4:07 pm

A couple of weeks ago on the Macbreak Weekly podcast, Andy Ihnatko said that he didn’t understand OmniFocus. It seemed wrong to him that tasks he’d just entered didn’t appear in his task list. I’ve read other complaints about this same thing, and when I was first using OmniFocus I also sometimes found myself confused about the whys and wherefores of task visibility. In this post, I’m going to:

Before going further, let me mention that I don’t work for Omni and have no insider knowledge about the program. Everything I say here is based strictly on my use of the program.

To understand OmniFocus, you must realize that it is not an application for making lists—if you want to make lists, you can use OmniOutliner or Opal or TextEdit or Pages or Numbers or, really, any application that lets you type in lines of text. The purpose of OmniFocus lies in the second half of its name: it’s designed to help you focus on your tasks, and it does that by hiding tasks that are not relevant to your current situation. It decides what to show and what to hide based on three things: the Context, the Project Type, and the Action View.

OmniFocus defines Contexts in exactly the same way as David Allen does in Getting Things Done. What you can and cannot do at any given time is determined by where you are and the tools you have at hand. That is your Context. You cannot, for example seal the grout in your shower when you’re at work, so “Seal shower grout” is not a task you should be looking at in the office1. OmniFocus lets you define whatever Contexts are appropriate for your life and assign one of those Contexts to each of your tasks. When you are in Context Mode, clicking the name of a Context will cause OmniFocus to show only those tasks assigned that Context.

There are two Project Types: sequential and parallel. The tasks in a sequential project have to be done in a particular order; the tasks in a parallel project can be done in any order. Here’s a sequential project from my OmniFocus database:

The project is identified as sequential by the two little tip-to-tail arrows. Clearly, I can’t install the fan until I have the fan and all the necessary auxiliary equipment.

Here’s a parallel project

where the stacked arrows identify it as parallel. I can do these two tasks in either order. The archetypal parallel project is probably the shopping list.

When you create a new project, OmniFocus will set it to be either sequential or parallel, depending on a setting in its preferences. You can change from one to the other by clicking arrows icon. The Project Type doesn’t have a direct, independent effect on the visibility of a task, but does affect it visibility in conjunction with the Action View.

Omni doesn’t seem to have an official name for what I call Action View, so I’d better start with an explanation. By Action View, I mean the setting you get from this menu in the View Bar:

As you can see, when you are in Context Mode, four Action Views are possible:

Since we’re in Context Mode, the word “all” in the above descriptions means “all in the current Context.”

The visibility of tasks in a given Context depend to some extent on the interaction between the Project Type and the Action View.

Action View Project Type Visible tasks
Remaining Sequential Uncompleted
Remaining Parallel Uncompleted
Due Soon Sequential Uncompleted and due within 2 days
Due Soon Parallel Uncompleted and due within 2 days
Next Action Sequential Uncompleted at the top of their project task list
Next Action Parallel Uncompleted at the top of their project task list
Available Sequential Uncompleted at the top of their project task list
Available Parallel Uncompleted
Completed Sequential Completed
Completed Parallel Completed

At first glance, this table may seem to be just a rehash of the earlier list of Action Views, but there’s one difference: the visible tasks for an Action View of Available depend on the Project Type. When the Project Type is sequential, Available works like Next Action. When the Project Type is parallel, Available works like Remaining.

If you think about it a bit, this makes sense. In a sequential project, you cannot do the second or later tasks until the first task is done, you cannot do the third and later task until the second is done, and so on. Therefore, only the top uncompleted task is “available” for you to do, which is why Available works like Next Action (“action” is a GTD word that’s identical to “task”). In a parallel project, on the other hand, every uncompleted task is “available” at any time, so Available works like Remaining.

Once I understood how it worked, Available became my normal Action View in Context Mode, because the Next Action is the right thing to focus on in a sequential project, and all Remaining actions should be considered in a parallel project. The one exception is the Waiting context—there I want to see all Remaining tasks no matter what type of project they belong to.

In Project Mode, there is another set of Action Views available:

In Project Mode “all” means “all in the currently selected project.” The interaction between Project Type and Action View is similar to that in Context Mode:

Action View Project Type Visible tasks
Any Status Sequential All tasks
Any Status Parallel All tasks
Remaining Sequential Uncompleted
Remaining Parallel Uncompleted
Next Action Sequential Uncompleted at the top of their project task list
Next Action Parallel Uncompleted at the top of their project task list
Available Sequential Uncompleted at the top of their project task list
Available Parallel Uncompleted
Completed Sequential Completed
Completed Parallel Completed

As in Context Mode, task visibility depends on Project Type only for the Available Action View. Project Mode has two unique visibility features:

  1. You see completed and uncompleted tasks at the same time.
  2. Tasks with a Context of Waiting are visible only with an Action View of Any Status or Remaining, regardless of the Project Type.

The latter feature makes Waiting tasks different from all the others with regard to the Available Action View. I guess Omni’s perspective on this is that something you’re Waiting for can’t be Available, which makes sense, even though it breaks consistency with other Contexts.

So, with all these interactions conspiring—rightly—to hide tasks from you, it’s no surprise that people are bewildered by their “missing” tasks when they first start using OmniFocus. There is a relatively simple way to see all Remaining tasks in all Contexts, but it’s hidden. You have to make the View Bar visible, then select All Contexts from the menu at the far left and Remaining from the Action View menu. If Omni created a button that would activate these settings with a single click and put that button in the in the toolbar where it would always be visible, I think it would help new users get acclimated to the OmniFocus way.

(Yes, I know you can create your own button that will do this by using Perspectives, but that’s too much to ask of a brand new user.)

Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, has written that he wanted in Perl to be like natural languages in the way new users could write useful programs very early on, before they attained fluency. A five-year-old doesn’t speak English like an adult, and often says things that adults think are funny and cute, but he still communicates. The same is true of non-native speakers who are just learning the language. Wall wanted Perl to be like that, and is probably most proud of how close it is to that ideal.

I think Omni should strive for the same ideal in OmniFocus. New users—and we’re all new users—are going to be coming from paper-and-pen lists or more elementary to-do list software, and the richness and “otherness” of OmniFocus is going to be offputting unless Omni can make it easier for users to get things done while still speaking baby-talk.

One more thing: OmniFocus for the iPhone forces you to choose your Action View in the Settings screen:

If you’re looking at your tasks in Context Mode and want to change the Action View, you have to go all the way back to the home screen, into Settings, change the Action View, back to home, then to Contexts, and finally to the specific Context you were originally at. This is ridiculous. Changing the Action View should be done through a menu that pops up from the toolbar.

The problem is the Waiting context—if I didn’t Waiting tasks, I’d just keep the setting at Available. But because I use Waiting to keep track of documents, reports, email, and phone calls that people owe me, I need to check the Waiting context fairly often. And because the Waiting context won’t show any tasks unless the Action View is set to Remaining, I have to keep switching the Action View back and forth between Available and Remaining. In the Mac version, I have Perspectives set up to handle this switching with a single click, but since the iPhone version doesn’t have Perspectives, I’m forced to do this intricate dance between screens.

As I was writing this post, I noticed a bug in how OmniFocus handles due dates in sequential projects. I’ve never noticed it before, because I seldom use due dates. It’ll have to wait for a later post.

Update
Ken Case of Omni Twittered me with an explanation of the Waiting difference:

If you want the Waiting context to behave exactly like other contexts, you can change its status from “On Hold” to “Active”.

I knew that Waiting was a unique Context because it’s built-in—you don’t have to create it. I didn’t realize it had a different status. In fact, I didn’t think contexts could have a status of On Hold, only projects. Of course, this means Status is a fourth element that determines whether a task is visible.

Tags:

  1. I’m assuming here that you’re trying to accomplish your listed tasks, not plan new projects. Planning can be done pretty much anywhere. ↩

Post #454 in mac, omnifocus, productivity | No Comments

OmniFocus syncing with WebDAV now working

August 4th, 2008 at 4:34 pm

As I mentioned in this post last week, one of my early problems with OmniFocus for the iPhone was an inability to sync with a non-MobileMe WebDAV server. According to the OmniFocus changelogs, many of the updates to both OF 1.1 for the Mac and OF for the iPhone have been improvements to the WebDAV syncing. Today I tried WebDAV syncing again and it seemed to work, so I may be able to drop my MobileMe subscription before the free trial is over.

I’m using OF 1.1 sneakypeek (v77.9.0.103649) on my Mac and OF 1.0.2 (v77.8.0.103469) on my iPhone and they’re syncing to a CPanel WebDAV server (which is called “Web Disk” in the Files section of the CPanel home page). I have no idea how, or if, syncing works with earlier versions of OF or other WebDAV servers. If you want to follow along with what I did, make sure you have good backups first; attempts to sync may screw up your main OF task database.

The first step is to start syncing from the Macintosh. Open the OF preferences and switch to the Sync panel. Choose Advanced from the sync choices and enter the URL of your WebDAV server. You may need to include port numbers (e.g., https://www.yourwebdavserver.com:1234) or subfolders (e.g., https://www.yourwebdavserver.com/documents) in the URL—that will depend on how the server is set up. You may have a choice between SSL (encrypted) and non-SSL (unencrypted) access. I would never use non-SSL access for personal data like this.

When the URL is entered, click the Sync Now button. If everything goes right, you’ll be prompted for your user name and password on the server. If the server’s SSL certificate wasn’t signed by a “trusted authority”—which means trusted by Apple, I think—you’ll be told that and asked if you want to trust it anyway. I can’t see any circumstance under which you wouldn’t trust the server you selected, so you can agree.

If you’re lucky, the initial sync will work and you can go on to set up OF on your iPhone. If the initial sync doesn’t work, I have only the most rudimentary advice: make sure there are no typos in your URL, user name, and password. Beyond that, you’ll have to ask for help from Omni.

The way to set up syncing on your iPhone will depend on your network situation.

If you’ve clicked the Share Settings button, open OF on the iPhone and tap the Settings item on the OF home screen. Scroll down until you see a “Get Settings from Mac” button. Tap it, and then tap the button with the name of your computer at the bottom of the next screen. Tap the sync button in the toolbar at the bottom of the screen and you’ll be prompted for your WebDAV user name and password again. Enter them and the sync should complete. If it doesn’t, check for typos and contact Omni.

I’d like to be more helpful in troubleshooting, but my experience has been that syncing either works—as it did for me today—or it doesn’t—as I found in the first couple of days after getting OF for the iPhone. Good luck!

Post #442 in iphone, mac, omnifocus, productivity | No Comments

OmniFocus bug fixes

July 31st, 2008 at 4:25 pm

The OmniFocus bug I described in this post on Monday, has been fixed. The “Sneaky Peek” version of OmniFocus 1.1 (necessary if you want to sync your tasks with your iPhone) no longer retains focus when you shift out of the Space it’s in. As mentioned in the updates at the bottom of that post, I got into an email correspondence with Ken Case, CEO of Omni and lead developer of OmniFocus, and he tracked down the problem and fixed it within a day or two.

I’m happy about the bug fix, of course, and I’m glad to see that Omni is searching the intertubes for feedback on their products. But…

A few days before writing the post, I had sent a bug report to Omni via OF’s Send Feedback… command in the Help menu. The feedback wasn’t sent from “Dr. Drang,” but from the name used on my OmniFocus license. It got an autoreply from Omni’s mail system, but still hasn’t gotten a response from a human.1

So Omni moved quickly to contact an anonymous and lightly-read blogger, but has yet to contact a licensed owner of its product who sent in a bug report via the channel Omni itself set up. There’s something wrong about that.

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  1. Admittedly, my feedback report wasn’t as detailed as the blog post, but it included the essentials: OF was retaining focus when switching Spaces. The blog post was more detailed because I’d thought about the problem for a few days. ↩

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