HackMake

OmniFocus Contexts, Folders, Perspectives, and Tasks in Launch Center Pro

Tight integration between OmniFocus and Launch Center Pro is continuing to unfold. Michael Schechter posted about some really fast ways to capture tasks using using the [prompt], [clipboard], and canned text in the action URL. Genius. I rushed to set this up and am really loving it.

But it gets better. I saw Justin Lancy link to this series of tweets from Ken Case, CEO of Omni Group, talking about URLs for contexts, folders, perspectives, and tasks to deep link into the app.

If you’ve played around with Launch Center at all, you’ll recognize omnifocus:///add, which allows you to add a new task. Ken mentions URLs to open a /context, /folder, /task, and /perspective, and all of these work with Launch Center Pro.

Here’s the man himself explaining how to get these URLs:

Context, folder, and task URLs can be generated from the Mac client by selecting something and using Edit->Copy As Link.

When you copy the link from OmniFocus on your Mac, you’ll end up with a URL that looks something like this for a context:

omnifocus:///context/ivk7b-f4OSH

And this for a single-action list:

omnifocus:///task/ffnCm4uVOEm

Perspective URLs use the perspective name rather than an internal id: “omnifocus:///perspective/PerspectiveName

A note here: you’ll have to encode the spaces in a perspective names with a %20. The URL for my Next Actions perspective looks like this:

omnifocus:///perspective/Next%20Actions

I set up some @contexts that make sense to be quickly accessible on iPhone, like @errands, @phone, and perspectives I’ve set up like Next and Daily.

Seeing this type of workflow ninja stuff (finally) on iPhone really excites me.