Launch Centre Pro & OmniFocus

Recently, Michael Schechter posted about using Launch Center Pro as a mobile alternative to David Sparks’ TextExpander snippets for OmniFocus. I’d heard about Launch Center Pro before but never really gave it much thought. At first glance it just seemed like an app launcher, and as someone who probably uses less than 10 apps regularly, and without any concrete use cases, it didn’t seem like something I had to buy.

AppCubby’s Launch Center Pro, for those as unfamiliar as I was, leads with the line:

Launch actions, not just apps!

A kind-of-neat phrase that does a good job of summing it up. Whilst I haven’t fully explored everything that Launch Center Pro does, I have added a few shortcuts to things like calling or texting specific people, as well as the OmniFocus shortcuts Michael described.

The idea is using the url schemes that OmniFocus provides to add tasks with some pre-determined format, and pre-populated data (e.g. from the clipboard). I’ve copied some of Michael’s shortcuts, and added a few cribbed from David Sparks’ snippets, my favourite being a ‘Conduct Research’ task for things I want to look up. There are two variants, one with, and one without, the clipboard contents included as a note.

	omnifocus:///add?name=Conduct%20research%20re%20
	omnifocus:///add?name=Conduct%20research%20re%20&note=[clipboard]

As an OmniFocus devotee, and someone who frequently uses TextExpander with OmniFocus on my Mac, this Launch Center Pro trick goes a long way to filling the void left by the lack of TextExpander support in the iOS versions of OmniFocus.