Chris Morrell

I’ve found that OmniFocus is by far my favorite task list manager, but one thing I always wished it could do was show me my lists in my browser (which I spend a lot more time in than in OmniFocus).  I’ve never been much of an AppleScript aficionado, but today I sat down and figured out a way to combine Firefox, OmniScript, the crontab and AppleScript in a way that gets me a nice list of my tasks each time I open a new tab.  Here’s how I did it:

First, create a new AppleScript:

tell application "OmniFocus"
set homepageFile to ((path to documents folder as rich text) & "OmniFocus.html")
tell default document
save in homepageFile as "HTML"
end tell
end tell

That will export your OmniFocus document as HTML to ~/Documents/OmniFocus.html (you can tweak the homepageFile variable to change the location).

Next, we want to edit the crontab.  I used CronniX (a decent cron GUI for OS X) to export my OmniFocus document every hour:

0 * * * * /usr/bin/osascript "/Users/yourname/Documents/OmniFocus Exporter.scpt"

Google “crontab tutorial” to learn how to tweak when it runs.

Finally, I set my home page in Firefox to ~/Documents/OmniFocus.html and installed the extension New Tab Homepage so that each time a open a new tab, my homepage loads.  Now whenever I open a new tab I’m presented a nice list of all my tasks.