Spootnik Tips for OmniFocus on Windows

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I still use OmniFocus during the day on Windows. But there’s a trick. I use Spootnik as a rudimentary interface to my projects and tasks. What’s Spootnik? It’s a third-party WebDAV syncing service for OmniFocus that provides a basic web interface to the OmniFocus data.

Spootnik is not a complete solution. It lacks the ability to set start and due dates, see or edit notes or choose assign projects. However, for a few dollars a month, it provides a very convenient way for me to add and process tasks while on Windows.1 I’ve used Spootnik for several years and I highly recommend it for anyone caught between the heaven and hell of Mac and Windows.

Here’s a couple of tips to make Spootnik even more useful.

Restyle It!

Spootnik is not attractive. However, CSS is not rocket science, especially with a Chrome plugin like Stylebot.

Here’s Spootnik out of the box:

Here’s how Spootnik looks for me:

And here’s my Stylebot CSS for Spootnik. It’s not great, but it’s better than brown. There are similar solutions for Firefox.

Search URLs

It wasn’t very obvious to me until the devolper pointed it out but the search URL’s are static. That means I can bookmark a search. So while I don’t get access to my OmniFocus perspectives, I can bookmark saved searches and context views.

This isn’t as great as it could be though. Searching does not match on contexts or project names. That means I need to add additional tags to the task title. It’s not the end of the world and it is certainly worth the effort to leverage more effective search in Spootnik. I’ll have more to say on this in the future.

  1. Spootnik also provides OmniFocus sync that has never gone down in the many years I’ve used it. Spootnik also provides a rudimentary email-to-inbox feature. It has for quite awhile and even supports attachments. ↩︎