Three questions (mostly about synching)
 

Hi, am thinking about buying Omnifocus for Iphone and for Mac.

1 I have a powerbook g4 running Tiger. Can I synch via bonjour?

2 is the synch sophisticated to merge desktoip and iphone databases intelligently? I.e. is there a chance older can ever overwrite newer?

3 how to handle immediate I'm-going-out-NOW-to-do-these-things lists? Make a new context for it? Or use starring?

1. Yes
2. Yes
3. Location associated contexts on the iPhone* and/or flagging of items.

* You can assign an address to a context on the iPhone so e.g. a Grocery store context could be assigned the address of your local shop.

For out and about items, I use a context called Auto. Inside that context I have child contexts, some have the location address entered and others do not.

Example:
Auto
-Grocery Store
-Grease Monkey

If I don't want to create a context for an action item, I'll place the action item into the Auto context.

One other context I use is called
place in car

This is a context I can check before leaving for my car to make sure I have everything I need in the car. I live in an apartment, so making trips to the car is a bigger deal than someone who has a garage at home.

Example:
-I have read The Catcher In The Rye
--pick up The Catcher In The Rye from library (auto -> library context)
--I have read The Catcher In The Ryee
---read 15 min a day of The Catcher In The Rye (home -> reading) repeating
--place The Catcher In The Ryee in auto (home -> place in car)
--return The Catcher In The Rye (auto -> library)

[QUOTE=Eric Schoenfeld;55501]
2 is the synch sophisticated to merge desktoip and iphone databases intelligently? I.e. is there a chance older can ever overwrite newer?
[/QUOTE]

You have to be a little careful here. Yes, you can change item A on the phone, item B on your desktop, sync, and the changes will be merged in the way that you would want. Where it gets a little tricky is if you change item A on the phone and also change item A on the desktop. When you sync, it will just take the "final" change, but I do not recall if "final" is determined by when the change was actually made, or by which device was the last one to sync.

Thanks, all!

[QUOTE]When you sync, it will just take the "final" change, but I do not recall if "final" is determined by when the change was actually made, or by which device was the last one to sync.[/QUOTE]

I hope we get an official answer on this. If the answer is the latter, I'd say that the synching process does NOT have the sort of intelligence that would give me confidence.

[QUOTE=Eric Schoenfeld;55529]Thanks, all!



I hope we get an official answer on this. If the answer is the latter, I'd say that the synching process does NOT have the sort of intelligence that would give me confidence.[/QUOTE]

You can screw things up with just about any tool if you use it incorrectly. If you change the same item in two different places, one of those changes will be lost, though it may not matter if you make an identical change. If you don't make an identical change, you may get a surprise. It's more likely to be a surprise/issue if you have different people making the changes than the same person, of course. A little bit of experimentation suggests that OF does track the time that the change is made and when syncing keeps the change with the most recent date/time. Your best bet for getting an official answer will be to send email to [email]omnifocus@omnigroup.com[/email] rather than posting on the forum, as the forums are read haphazardly compared to their email.

Ticking off a repeating action in two different places, then syncing will get you duplicate actions.

When it comes to resolving sync conflicts, most recent change (not sync) is the one that wins.

For performance reasons on the phone (which is about 2000 times slower than a desktop machine) we do this conflict resolution on a by-record basis, rather than a by-field basis.

Example which will cause a change to be lost:
Change due date of action on mac
Change note of same action on phone
sync mac
sync phone
Conflict: two edits to same record from two devices.
Result: due date change is ignored in favor of note change, which is more recent.

Example which will not cause a change to be lost:
Change due date of action on mac
sync mac
sync phone (fetching new due date)
change note of same action on phone
sync phone