What am I doing wrong in review mode?

[TripleM]

I've got the app and am all sync'd up. The review is, for me, what really will set this apart from the iPhone version. But I can't seem to figure out how to use the review.

When I go to review, it says that no projects are due for review. This is not true as I haven't reviewed my projects in some weeks.

When I touch and hold on a project and choose the "review" option, it brings up the review window. The project says last reviewed July 11, review weekly. That seems to me to indicate that it is, in fact, due for a review. I am finding this with all projects.

My view is set to "remaining".

Anyone else having this problem? What am I doing wrong?

[Cameron]

I was actually confused by this recently on the Mac version. I was behind on my review, but when went to the review perspective, they were all sorted under "review within the next week". Then, i checked the info pane and my "next review" dates were, in fact, in the future.

I contacted the ninjas, and apparently if you miss a review, it will automatically push the next review date forward which is probably why they are not appearing on your iPad. Im not clear on when or how far Omnifocus chooses to advance the review date.

[TripleM]

Thanks for the reply. That's odd, because I never noticed that. I don't have my mac version with me now, but I thought I remembered seeing something along the line of "due in the last week" when I missed things. I'll have to check that out when I can access my Mac tomorrow.

You may be proving just how faulty my memory is.

[whpalmer4]

I was actually confused by this recently on the Mac version. I was behind on my review, but when went to the review perspective, they were all sorted under "review within the next week". Then, i checked the info pane and my "next review" dates were, in fact, in the future.

I contacted the ninjas, and apparently if you miss a review, it will automatically push the next review date forward which is probably why they are not appearing on your iPad. Im not clear on when or how far Omnifocus chooses to advance the review date.

No, someone must be mistaken. OmniFocus should only change the next review date if you click the Mark Reviewed button, or if you edit the date in the inspector. If there's some feature that is supposed to advance the next review date because you haven't done a review on time (a perfectly dreadful idea!), it is broken, because I've got some active projects which haven't been reviewed for over a year, and they show up exactly where they should, in the "Review more than a year ago" group when grouping by Next Review.

That said, I don't understand why TripleM isn't seeing projects for review in the Review view. What does the inspector on the Mac show for the next review dates?

[atreinke]

I have 34 projects showing up for review within the next week on my Mac. They are due August 1.

When I look at my iPad it shows no projects are due to be reviewed when I set the review period for 1 week, month, day, year....

Can't figure out why. I must have something set wrong somewhere.

[TripleM]

I am a firefighter and will be on shift, away from my Mac, until tomorrow, so I can't answer your inspector question. What I can tell you confidently is that I haven't marked anything reviewed for weeks.
I can also say that even on my iPad, a randomly selected project shows last review as July 11, and the same project shows as review every week. By my math, that should be due for a review, but again, I may be the one mistaken.

[whpalmer4]

I have 34 projects showing up for review within the next week on my Mac. They are due August 1.

When I look at my iPad it shows no projects are due to be reviewed when I set the review period for 1 week, month, day, year....

Can't figure out why. I must have something set wrong somewhere.
The iPad app shows those projects for which the next review date is no longer in the future. If you make a test project on the Mac, set the next review date to yesterday and sync it over to the iPad, it should show up as available for review (it will also show that it was last reviewed today, because you created it today).

[whpalmer4]

I am a firefighter and will be on shift, away from my Mac, until tomorrow, so I can't answer your inspector question. What I can tell you confidently is that I haven't marked anything reviewed for weeks.
I can also say that even on my iPad, a randomly selected project shows last review as July 11, and the same project shows as review every week. By my math, that should be due for a review, but again, I may be the one mistaken.
The inspector will show the year of the last reviewed date as well, but upon some fiddling, I see that the iPad app will also show the year if it is not the current year. I was thinking that perhaps the next review date was July 11, 2011, as it isn't too difficult when typing in dates in the desktop version to get the wrong year if you just type day and month...mystery remains!

[atreinke]

The iPad app shows those projects for which the next review date is no longer in the future. If you make a test project on the Mac, set the next review date to yesterday and sync it over to the iPad, it should show up as available for review (it will also show that it was last reviewed today, because you created it today).

Guess I should learn to read, the iPad states:

"No projects are DUE to be reviewed."

The Mac states:

"Review within the NEXT week"

So the review function on the iPad differs from the function on the Mac. OK, I can work with that, now that I know it. I keep forgetting that this is a separate program and not the Mac just ported over.

[whpalmer4]

Yep, the Mac always shows you everything (within the constraints of the project filter), but groups it by staleness. The iPad shows you all projects (including on hold or completed or pending) which have passed their next review date, but in sidebar order, never mind that the documentation claims they are ordered by staleness. There's no question about when your review is done on the iPad :)

[Cameron]

No, someone must be mistaken. OmniFocus should only change the next review date if you click the Mark Reviewed button, or if you edit the date in the inspector. If there's some feature that is supposed to advance the next review date because you haven't done a review on time (a perfectly dreadful idea!), it is broken, because I've got some active projects which haven't been reviewed for over a year, and they show up exactly where they should, in the "Review more than a year ago" group when grouping by Next Review.

That said, I don't understand why TripleM isn't seeing projects for review in the Review view. What does the inspector on the Mac show for the next review dates?

I am using the 1.8 sneaky peeks and only recently noticed the issue (feature?). I got behind in my reviews for the first time in awhile and the inspector on Omnifocus Mac said something like (I'm guessing dates here):

Last reviewed July 10th
Review every 1 week
Next review July 30th

Those dates are not exact as im not at my Mac right now, but you can see why i was confused.

I emailed the ninjas and got this response:

Thanks for contacting us! If you miss a review date (or three), OmniFocus automatically pushes the review date up to the next day of the week from the last time the project was reviewed, rather than giving you a "next review" date in the past. Hope this clears things up!

[whpalmer4]

Yeah, that means if you reviewed something that had a review interval of 1 week 10 days late, the next review date isn't set to be something in the past.

[TripleM]

So, I've read all of the responses and really appreciate them. I have to say that some of them are above my head.

I still have no projects in my review window unless I "force" individual projects in by touching and holding a project and choosing review from the popup menu.

Are there any settings I should be tweaking? Is there somewhere to control the "review period"?

Lest you think me lazy, I have submitted an email with screen caps to the og ninjas. I'm just really anxious because the review was the killer feature for me.

[whpalmer4]

Pick a project and force it into review mode as you described. Set the review interval to be 1 day. Then tap the Mark Reviewed button. Sync the iPad, then sync your Mac. Find that project on the Mac, bring up the inspector, and see what it reports for last review date and next review date. Report back here and we will figure out the next step.

[rudrudson]

Hi,
I have the same problem. In Review Mode on the iPad some projects are not shown, which are shown in the desktop version.

[atreinke]

I made a mistake on this the other day. The Mac will show you projects that are due for review now and in the future - i.e.: next week, etc.

The iPad will only show projects that are due for review now or overdue, not those in the future like next week.

Can this be the problem? It was for me.... I didn't have any due for review until the next day. They would show up on my Mac but not my iPad.

[blewis]

Feels messed up to me.

I clicked review and was shocked to see so few entries knowing I had not done a proper review in ages.

So I click a project, click and hold and force a review and it tells me I haven't reviewed the project since July 7th and it's set to review every week.

How in the world would it make any sense that this project doesn't show up when I click Review on the left bar?

Screwed up. Sending bug report now.

[curt.clifton]

blewis,

Out of curiosity. are you using landscape or portrait mode? Do any projects show up if you rotate the display (forcing a screen refresh)? I'm wondering if there's a problem with the code the renders the display or if the problem is in the code that detects which projects are due (or overdue) for review.

[blewis]

Hey Curt. I use both orientations and I don't see a difference between them w.r.t. Review mode.

Thanks.

[blewis]

Yeah, even after a sync of all 3 apps, my OF Desktop shows 29 Projects needing a "Review with in the last month". OF iPad says 0 items need to be reviewed.

Something is off.

[whpalmer4]

It does sound that way. Why don't you snag a copy of your database off the iPad and mail it to Omni for analysis? In iTunes, goto the Apps page, scroll to the bottom, select OmniFocus, click on the OmniFocus.ofocus file and Save to some convenient spot. Mail the file + a description of what is going on to omnifocus-ipad@omnigroup.com and maybe they can reproduce the behavior with your database.

On the desktop, you can still set a review interval for a number of hours (they plan to remove this). If you set the review interval for some project to an hour or two and force review it on the iPad, does it show up as available after the review period has passed? I'm wondering if this issue is just a startup glitch that will go away after you've reviewed everything once on the iPad, though if I'm reading your posts correctly, it sounds like even after the review interval has passed, they aren't showing up as available for review.

[niels]

Hi,
I have the same problem. In Review Mode on the iPad some projects are not shown, which are shown in the desktop version.

Another me too post. I've emailed support. I'm using OF 1.7.5 on my Mac & had several projects whose review due date (from inspector) was in the past. They didn't by default show in the iPad as needing review. However tap & hold on project & select review put it into the review area & showed last review date matching what was on my Mac.

Something isn't matching up as expected. If a project's Last Reviewed date is more than the review every cycle & thus the Next Review date is also in the past, it should appear in the iPad review area, without having to force it. Hopefully this is just an initial sync issue & as we review more, they will align better.

[DerekM]

I've managed to repro this with some time manipulation and we're looking into it. Thanks for bringing it to our attention!

[blewis]

Well, this is odd. It's now 8/4 and this morning I've had 34 projects show up needing a review.

Almost all of these projects haven't been reviewed since 7/7 and most are set on a review period of 1 week.

I have no logical explanation why this would have occured like this. My first suspicion is that the "review interval counter" had been reset and maybe these wouldn't show up for a week. But its been 4 days and now they all suddenly show up.

Oh well. Hopefully the behavior becomes predictable after is hiccup.

[Ken Case]

Short version:

We tracked down this bug yesterday afternoon and the fix will be in the next update.

Long version:

For the curious, the problem was with reading synchronized review dates which were in the past: the system which last modified the next review date wouldn't bother writing it when it could be implied by the the previous review date and the review interval. But when other systems which read that review date would calculate the next review date for the project, they would always choose the first future iteration of that interval.

In other words, if you have a project which is set to review every Friday and you last reviewed it two weeks ago, it would end up assigning a review date of the upcoming Friday rather than last Friday.

So this didn't affect people who always did their reviews on the same device (probably pretty common if you had a weekly review routine involving the same device), nor did it affect people who never let a review slip past its review date and were synchronizing their devices regularly (since the synchronized next review dates would be read while they were still in the future, and thus wouldn't be skipped).

Sorry this slipped through the cracks! We're now testing a fix for the 1.0.2 release which we're planning to submit within the next few days.

[mickdo100]

Just to say I am having this bug as well. Love the app, looking forward to the fix.

[hypotyposis]

We're now testing a fix for the 1.0.2 release which we're planning to submit within the next few days.

Ken, you guys need to take a chill regarding pace of updates: you're going to make "99ers" (term of the day) of all those folks over on the blog who were predicting that it would be years til we saw OF iPad, and that your pace of development is glacial!

Less sarcastically, thank you again to the OmniGroup for being SO responsive to customer feedback and so transparent. I sent an email this morning to a company providing online test-prep, asking them if they were planning to make a non-Flash based version of their website for iOS users... Reply was: "We use Flash as it's easy to port across platforms. We have no intention of changing this. Email Apple, with enough feedback they might introduce support for Flash." ... wow ... So anyway, thanks for brilliant customer service and support, and not treating your clients like morons!

[speed2fly]

Excellent thanks - this is a great feature for the iPad and really useful to review things while at the coffee shop.

[OFun]

Short version:

We tracked down this bug yesterday afternoon and the fix will be in the next update.

Long version:

For the curious, the problem was with reading synchronized review dates which were in the past: the system which last modified the next review date wouldn't bother writing it when it could be implied by the the previous review date and the review interval. But when other systems which read that review date would calculate the next review date for the project, they would always choose the first future iteration of that interval.

In other words, if you have a project which is set to review every Friday and you last reviewed it two weeks ago, it would end up assigning a review date of the upcoming Friday rather than last Friday.

So this didn't affect people who always did their reviews on the same device (probably pretty common if you had a weekly review routine involving the same device), nor did it affect people who never let a review slip past its review date and were synchronizing their devices regularly (since the synchronized next review dates would be read while they were still in the future, and thus wouldn't be skipped).

Sorry this slipped through the cracks! We're now testing a fix for the 1.0.2 release which we're planning to submit within the next few days.


I downloaded the update.

I still don't understand why projects don't queue up by staleness in review mode (iPad version) as they do in the desktop version. Why would they queue up according to the order in the project menu? I think I'm missing something.

thanks!!

[curt.clifton]

Many of us use order in project mode as a rough sort of priority. So, for example, my personal and family projects are above my work ones, to help overcome my workaholic tendencies. When I'm up to date on my reviews, then ordering by project order is great for me.

That said, it is strange that the orders don't match between the iPad and Mac. Use Contact Omni in the gear menu to make sure your concerns are heard.

[whpalmer4]

I downloaded the update.

I still don't understand why projects don't queue up by staleness in review mode (iPad version) as they do in the desktop version. Why would they queue up according to the order in the project menu? I think I'm missing something.

thanks!!

Because what was implemented was just marching through the projects in sidebar order. It's the equivalent of doing a review on the desktop grouped by ungrouped, if it only showed projects that are due for review (or everything is due for review).

The documentation does suggest that the intention was to sort them, although the description is ambiguous ("in order of last review, from the most to the least stale"). By all means, use Contact Omni to send in your vote that this be changed if this is important to you. There are certainly plenty of things they would like to do, and only so many hours in the day; sending in feedback helps align their priorities with yours.