I manage all of my personal projects and tasks in OmniFocus, but recently I was working on a larger project and realized it would be nice to have a more visual Kanban-style view of the projects instead of just the list of tasks in OmniFocus. Trello has a great (and free) iPad app that allows this sort of visualization.

I didn’t want to type all of my tasks again just to get them into Trello, so I wanted to automate transferring the tasks from OmniFocus to Trello. Since I only use OmniFocus on my iPad and since Workflow has actions for both OmniFocus and Trello, Workflow seemed like the ideal solution. (My solution actually requires not just Workflow but also Pythonista, as a small Python script was the best way I could accomplish part of this process.)

Rather than write what would be a very long and probably boring description, I prepared a screencast to demonstrate the workflow.

Get the apps, workflow and script

• OmniFocus
• Trello
• Workflow
• Pythonista 3
• OmniFocus to Trello workflow
• Python script

Panic makes great apps (I use a few of them). I hate that this happened to them, but you have to admire their transparency and openness about this situation.

The Case of the Stolen Source Code

I recently bought OmniFocus for my iPad after finding other task management apps insufficient. The one real weakness I found in OmniFocus was the inability to link to tasks in other projects to indicate a cross-project dependency. (From my research online, I gather that most OmniFocus users think this is counter to accepted usage patterns and thus not a good idea. Nonetheless, it’s something I need to do.)

While doing research to figure out if this was possible, I found a discussion forum where an OmniFocus user mentioned that in the Mac version of OmniFocus (which I didn’t buy), it’s possible to copy the link to a task. I wondered if this was also possible in the iOS version.

I started by opening the task, clicking the “share” button and selecting “copy,” which yielded this:

omnifocus:///task/cIx7zMCx7iz?name=Test%20task&note=This%20is%20a%20test.&parallel=true
omnifocus:///task/cIx7zMCx7iz
- Test task @parallel(true) @autodone(false)
	This is a test.

The task’s URL is there: omnifocus:///task/cIx7zMCx7iz.

Next step: Can I use Workflow to parse just the task URL and copy it to the clipboard?

I have an action extension workflow with one step — View Content Graph. Running this workflow on the OmniFocus task, I could see that OmniFocus was passing the task URL to Workflow.

 

Using another action extension workflow that gets the URLs from the input and displays them using the Quick Look action, I determined — through a bit of trial and error by running it on various tasks — that the task URL is always the last URL that OmniFocus passes to Workflow.

 

The task URL can be easily retrieved using the Get Item From List action, so the workflow is just three steps:

 

The workflow is available here.

I recorded this video in May of 2015 during takeoff from Aéroport Nice Côte d’Azur (NCE) on a flight bound for Heathrow Airport (LHR). The airport is bordered by the Mediterranean Sea on three sides, and during takeoff we flew over the sea before turning back inland. After the plane levels over the sea, you can see part of the airport in the right side of the frame.

Video recorded during takeoff from LaGuardia Airport (LGA) on April 10, 2016. We flew over the northern end of Manhattan, which provided a good view of the skyline.