Omniboard = OmniFocus + Kanban
Omniboard is a pure ruby library to generate kanban boards from OmniFocus databases. It sources its data directly from your local OmniFocus XML library, bypassing the OmniFocus application. This has a number of advantages over previous methods of fetching data, including:
- You no longer need an OmniFocus 2 Pro license in order to fetch data via ScriptingBridge.
- You no longer need to have OmniFocus open in order to fetch data.
- You no longer need to run two separate programs, using a database as an intermediary.
- You have full access to all project, folder, task and context data from within the one program.
While kanban-fetch ran on top of the sinatra web framework, Omniboard instead generates a static webpage for you to move around and use as you see fit. Each Omniboard-generated kanban page is one file only, and everything - CSS, javascript, contents, and images - is contained within that page. You can just open in in your browser like you would any other html file, email it to yourself, host it on dropbox, or any number of other things.
You will need
In order to run Omniboard, you will need (obviously) to have an OmniFocus license and be using OmniFocus for all of your projects. You will also need to have Apple’s Developer Tools installed (e.g. by having a working copy of XCode installed on your computer). This is because Omniboard relies on rubyfocus, which uses the nokogiri library for XML parsing. I hope to remove this dependency in the near future.
It is also helpful to have a passing knowledge of the ruby programming language, especially if you want to customise your columns.
To install
Omniboard comes as a ruby gem. Download it from github. For basic installation instructions, see the readme.
Running with pow
If you use pow and want to host your generated kanban page on it, you can! Just make a pow page as you normally would, and move your new kanban page to /public/index.html.
Get Omniboard
Additional links
For more information on Omniboard, check out related posts.
