Omnifocus tasks in iphone and ical
 

Question 1:

Ok, I've been adjusting settings and preferences with omnifocus for mac and iphone. I want to make omnifocus tasks automatically alert me by email or SMS for tasks that contain due dates (dont think sms is possible just email is fine). Right now I'm going in the tasks list in ical or mail (after i sync omnifocus and ical), and manually adding the email alerts to the tasks. Is there a way to configure automatic email alerts?

Question 2:

Also I configured omnifocus for iphone to create a notifications calendar (the setting in preferences). How exactly does this function work? Can anyone describe the exact behavior of this function? I went into ical and subscribed to that calendar at me.com/example/duesoon.ics (or something along those lines) and it adds data to the calendar for events and times ( but not all events). Im just trying to understand this feature. I would love to be able to set a task and due date and have it appear in the calendar, as opposed to the task list like it does now. My impression is that this creates alerts for my upcoming tasks, and if subscribed to in ical (as i don't think it was intended) you can see the todo's in calendar.

Any information about any of this would be appreciated. Thank You

You can set up automatic notifications via Growl, which has options to send email and SMS alerts (the latter via a paid service, I believe). [url]http://growl.info[/url] to download.

The notification calendar feature writes a calendar full of 0 minute appointments the configured interval before the due date of actions with due dates in the next 14 days, and updates it every time the iPhone application does a sync. In the future, the desktop application will also update this calendar, but for now, only syncing the iPhone app will update it. If you've subscribed your iPhone's calendar app to this calendar, you'll get popup notifications of those due items even if you are in another application or don't have internet connectivity. It isn't intended to be used as a calendar of what you need to work on and when, just a workaround for a hole in the lineup of services Apple offers to developers.

If you search the forums a bit, there's an Applescript posted by Brian that sounds like it might do a bit of what you want. Personally, I like to get my "due" stuff out of the way a bit earlier than the length of time it will take to do prior to the deadline, because no matter the schedule I set, I rarely get to keep it!