Getting Today's Tasks on Notification Center?

[matt1]

I love the notification center in iOS5. It's nice being able to swipe down and quickly see the status of email messages, iCal events, text messages, etc.

I use the OF flag feature in Omnifocus to create a Today page. Works great.

I would love to somehow get my Today page in notification center. Is this possible in any way? Just off the top of my head I would be happy with any of the following:

- syncing flagged OF tasks with Reminders, as long as those reminders also showed up in Notification Center. Doubt this is possible.

- flagged OF tasks show up in Notification Center (but not in reminders). I don't see how this would currently be possible either.

- Some method where I could get my flagged tasks a due date, or start date, or some other parameter that causes them to show up in Notification Center. I have no idea if this will work. I've tried to figure it out but so far all I've accomplished is becoming more confused.

Is any of this possible? Thanks for any suggestions.

[Christian]

Right now only due tasks (due date and time has passed) will be in the notification center. People have expressed interest in also having "due soon" tasks added to the center. I am not sure if the corresponding feature request at Omni does already include flagged tasks so if you want to make sure this is being considered as a future feature I recommend sending a mail to support, just saying you would like to see this.

Good idea btw!

[matt1]

Thanks for the quick response Christian.

I took all flagged items and change their due date to today (at a previous time) and they don't appear in notification center. Perhaps they don't show up when done that way (going backwards). Perhaps new tasks that have a due date and THEN pass do show up, but that doesn't really help me with a daily todo list.

I'll keep trying. Thanks!

[Christian]

Try setting all your flagged tasks to due today, 5 minutes from now (10 if you have many flagged tasks). Then close the app and also close it from running in the background (double click on home button, tap and hold OF icon till it move, press delete icon).

From what I have observed, OF reminders actually act as reminders right now, not as a kind of an additional perspective in a different place. Hence it shows the reminder but when you then open the corresponding task, oF assumes that you are "reminded" now and deletes the reminder from notifications center. That could be another thing to add to your support email: please leave reminders for due, due soon and flagged items in notifications until they have been marked as done in the app.

[matt1]

Great suggestion Christian. And it worked, kind of. When the due time came I checked notification center and it said:

Due: Change Air Filter (and 4 more)

Haha. So close! Thanks for your help. I'll make a feature request :)

[Christian]

Go to settings, notification center, omnifocus. Up top there should be a drop down where you can chose how many due tasks should be shown in the center. Set it to 10 and see what happens (might have to set the due date 5 minutes ahead again).

[matt1]

I tried it with 4 tasks, and set Notification Center to show 10. It still did the "one task (plus 3 others).

Thanks for your help though Christian. I have a better understanding of everything now, even if it won't work currently.

[Ken Case]

Unfortunately, there aren't any new Notification Center APIs in iOS 5; the only way something from a third-party app can show up in there is when it schedules a local notification to fire when the app isn't active. In iOS 4, that notification would have presented itself as an alert, but in iOS 5 it can show up as a line in the notification center (depending on what you've configured in Settings).

If we wanted to show all your Flagged items, we'd need to send a notification for each one—notifications which would present themselves as alerts on some devices. And even then they wouldn't stay there: as soon as you open OmniFocus, the system considers all of its notifications acknowledged and removes them from the list. So we'd have to schedule a fresh round of notifications again as soon as you left the app.

It would be great to have more flexible APIs around this functionality; hopefully we'll see some in iOS 6.

[matt1]

It would be great to have more flexible APIs around this functionality; hopefully we'll see some in iOS 6.

Thanks for the response Ken. Hopefully that will happen. Thanks again.