Entering a Date (suggestion)
 

I can't see where this changeable, so I'll post it here.

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The date can only be entered (for an activity) as 12/18/07. It would be really, really easier if the slashes were not required nor the year. So entering the date I want would be 1218 and Focus would see it as 12/18/07.

Will there be an option for other date formats (MM/DD/YYYY or DD/MM/YYYY

Nice software though, I have been less a tester than a user.

yes, agreed.

I'm not sure I would know to parse your 1218 as December 18, but I certainly wouldn't guess your intention to be today's date in the year 1218, as OmniFocus currently does!

You can enter year month day
071211
translates to
12/11/2007

or you can enter
12-11
translates to 12/11/2007

or you can enter
dec 11
translates to 12/11/2007

Rabbit Trail
This has nothing to do with the original poster... and I hope they don't take offense.
But...
Why in the name of all that is holy do we have a date system with mm-dd-yy makes no sense to me.

Check out all the other contries that use dd-mm-yy
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calendar_date[/url]

And US in it's stubborness sticks to it's format of mm-dd-yy.
It's about as smart as the reason why we stick to U.S. customary units instead of the metric system.

As far as computers go... yymmdd makes the most sense as the date becomes a number that is sortable in a column.

But for human interaction, using the day first makes the most sense, because that is what changes the most, then the month, then the year.

It's like the odometer on the car.
When we display the odometer on the car its
hundreds, tens, digits

And it makes sense. Just like
year-month-date

What if for miles we used a system like:

tens-digits-hundreds
or mm-dd-yy

What we are used to seeing now is
345 miles
would be shown as
453

It's hard to get rid of something we are used to.

Not to mention all the keyboards having a qwerty layout.
Which was designed to slow people down because typewriters weren't fast enough and the keys kept jamming.
They were also designed for salesmen. So a salesmen without any typing skills could type out the word typewriter because it is all on the top row.

Now the keyboards are faster than a human can type, and everyone still uses qwerty because it's what we are used to.
[url]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qwerty[/url]

I like that Canada is listed under every possible date format. This explains why Canadian dates have been problematic.

Thanks Spiral on the date. The system I use all the time and work on (HP3000/fortran) accepts the date as 1218. My fingers are so use to using that format it struck me as odd not to able to enter a date.
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As for your other date stuff, excellent points and info. To that point, the system I work with being so old stores the date as an integer; programmers (of which is not me) must convert to a date each time it is reported (max: 32,767 days).

Sigh.

[QUOTE=askon;26192]Thanks Spiral on the date. The system I use all the time and work on (HP3000/fortran) accepts the date as 1218. My fingers are so use to using that format it struck me as odd not to able to enter a date.
==
As for your other date stuff, excellent points and info. To that point, the system I work with being so old stores the date as an integer; programmers (of which is not me) must convert to a date each time it is reported (max: 32,767 days).

Sigh.[/QUOTE]

No problem. All the different systems out there... it's a wonder we are able to adapt so ingeniously.

with your 1218 in OmniFocus, Omnifocus would need to decipher what a number like 1218 would be translated to.

If only 4 numbers are entered, it would make sense to me that the software recognize that the first two are month and the second two are day. In the American model.

For a foreigner, 0101 could mean
the first day of january

So then the OmniFocus software would need a preference to allow a user to set the date entering preference.
ddmm
or
mmdd

It would make date entry extremely fast. :-)

In most cases I set the current date as the start date in newly created actions.
It would be nice if OmniFocus could pre-populate the start date field of a new action with the current date and let me just tab on to the next field.

The date could be selected so that it can be overwritten immediately in case
another date should be defined for the start date.

Alternative: keyboard shortcut for the current date: spacebar or cmd-spacebar for instance.

Strangely, entering a date as 12 18, OF interprets it as 11/18/07. This 1-month difference has been consistent for a while.

12.18 works fine.