Omnifocus web interface1/7/2024 The death knell for me with Ascend was its poor quality. Ascend replaced some of the anemic default applications on the Treo (like the laughable ToDo application) with their own versions, and it worked really well. At the time we were having these discussions (late 1990’s), the best thing going was Franklin Covey’s Ascend (a desktop application for Windows) and the Palm Treo. Finding a good system that doesn’t get in your way yet allows you to organize all the things going on in your life (both personal and professional) is surprisingly difficult, given the number of tools that purport to do just this. We used to call those conversations productivity porn, not realizing that someone would come along an formalize that term, albeit slightly skewed, as Productivity Pr0n. See Alsoįor more on this topic, listen to (or read the transcript of) the episode of The Omni Show from October 2018: How We Built OmniFocus for the Web.įor details about security, see our blog post How Security and Encryption Work in OmniFocus for the Web.One of my former coworkers & I used to spend hours talking about how to set up the best individualized personal information manager. It’s served by a Content Delivery Network to make sure it’s as fast in Australia as it is here in Seattle. This is what’s actually running in your web browser. The front end is the HTML and JavaScript that runs the user interface and that talks to an API host. This is how you can have OmniFocus open on your Mac or iOS device and have OmniFocus for the Web open, and a change made on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad will show up in your browser without your having to do anything. (Now you can.)īut we found this useful for OmniFocus for the Web - an API host gets a notification that something changed, and it triggers an update in the front end, in your browser. In those days you couldn’t use Apple’s push notifications service with apps distributed outside the App Store. The notifications service, written in Go, had originally been written to send notifications to the non-Mac-App-Store edition of OmniFocus for Mac. (It may be a surprise to hear that we have a lot of Python experience. It also cleans up idle instances and takes care of API host scaling. The coordinator initiates an instance of the shared model code for each user, and makes sure that user is connected to that instance. We run more than one of these, so that if we need to take one offline (for an upgrade, for instance) then OmniFocus for the Web will continue working. The front end doesn’t talk directly to the shared code - instead, we’ve created an API, and the front end talks to one of our API hosts, which then talks to the shared model code. API HostsĪPI hosts sit between the front end and the shared model code. They are: API hosts, the coordinator, the notifications sytem, and the front end (the user interface). In addition to that shared model code, the web version has additional components that aren’t shared - they’re only for the web app. But it’s not the only thing running on the web. It means that, when you’re using OmniFocus for the Web, you’re actually connecting to a sandboxed instance of that same OmniFocus code that’s running on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Given that this code is all under-the-hood code - it’s not user interface code - we realized that we could run it on the web, too, as long as we’re using Mac servers. Something that works perfectly in one place might not work in another, or might work subtly differently. But that would have meant more work up front and more ongoing work, as both versions would have to be in step with each other.Īnd it’s likely that each version would have different bugs. Our model code - the code that manages the database and syncing - was already shared between OmniFocus for Mac and iOS, and it’s a mix of Objective-C and Swift code.įor OmniFocus for the Web, we could have written a new version of this code in another language such as Go or Ruby. It actually makes complete sense! Shared Database and Syncing Code John’s right: it’s so Omni, and it does sound a little nutty - but only because it’s not what most companies do. It’s so very Omni to do something so nutty-sounding. Crazy, right? And so for all of the consternation that people like us, and all the anger we have at developers who make web apps and put it in a shell and call it their Mac app, The Omni Group has done the right thing! They took their Mac app and now it’s on the web! Super-super great. …instead, what these crazy people did is they’re using the same Objective-C and Swift code that OmniFocus for Mac is built with, and they’re running it on Mac servers, and they just have web output display from the same code. If you listen to The Talk Show Live from WWDC 2019, near the beginnning (around 3:33) you’ll hear the host John Gruber talk about OmniFocus for the Web:
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