1 context child with 2 parents?
 

Hi,

I would like to have the context child email with 2 parents Mac and iPad

so it would be:
Mac : email
iPad : email

but email is for both the same. --> a shared context between both

You can have two different contexts named as you propose, but not one context with two different parents.

Why not an Email context, with iPad and Mac children? Most tasks would just go in Email, and only those that needed to be done on a specific device would go in one of the children.

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;110455]You can have two different contexts named as you propose, but not one context with two different parents.

Why not an Email context, with iPad and Mac children? Most tasks would just go in Email, and only those that needed to be done on a specific device would go in one of the children.[/QUOTE]

Wouldn't this be a bad solution? Because if I select the Email context, I would see all Mac and iPad NAs, too. When I am off home with my iPad and I want to work on Emails, I could select the Email:iPad contact and everything would be fine. But if I choose the parent Email context, to work on general Emails to do it with my iPad, I would see the Email:Mac NAs too, which are not applicable in that situation. Any solution for that?

Karsten

I'm hurt that you think I would give you a bad solution :-)

If you tap on the Contexts button in the OmniFocus for iPad sidebar, you get all of your contexts. If you tap the > button, you can drill down through the hierarchy in the sidebar, and you would see your Email context, which would also have a > button (as it has contexts nested inside). While viewing the Email context along with its children, you can use the disclosure triangles at the upper right hand corner of each context to open or close that context. If you tap and hold on one of the triangles, you'll get the option to collapse or expand all of them in the view. So, you can show only the ones you want at the moment, and hide the rest. I do a similar construct for my computer activities, dividing along the "internet"/"no internet" boundary, then dividing by device type and specific device. This gives me contexts such as "Internet : Mac: iMac i7", "Internet : iPad : iPad 2", "Mac : MacBook : Snow Leopard". I can easily pick up an iPad, launch OmniFocus, and look at just the actions available for that iPad, or that iPad plus general internet tasks but not internet tasks related to any of the Macs, etc. Similarly, if I'm on the MacBook Air somewhere without an internet connection, I can look at tasks to be done on that Mac without internet, or tasks to be done on any Mac.

Oh, uh. I didn't want to hurt you. ;) Your posts are almost valuable and useful for me. Thank you for this and all your former postings. And of course for those to come. :)

The 'using the triangle'-solution seems to me like a work around. I usually put the context Email:Mac on hold, when I'm with my iPad. But that's a workaround, too. I was experimenting with another setup with following contexts:

Emails (always empty)
|
|---- Emails:General (doesn't matter: iPad or Mac)
|---- Emails:iPad
|---- Emails:Mac

But that seems the wrong way,too, because 'Emails' isn't a context but more a folder. I really would like to see an 'automatic' solution, which 'feels' right. :)

Have fun!
Karsten

If using the disclosure triangles in this fashion is a workaround, how would you use them (for anything) that wasn't a workaround? This is something that has been in OmniFocus from the beginning, for this very purpose (showing only part of a collection). The iPad heeds the open/closed state of each group, too, so if you save a perspective you can have a complicated view restored with a single tap.

If you could easily do something like the Mac's cmd-click selection of multiple contexts, that might be better in some ways. My experience with multiple selection of objects in OmniGraffle for iPad doesn't cause me to wish for that, however. The disclosure triangles are easier targets to reliably manipulate, for me.

I think we are in agreement that it is often easier to determine that something could be better than to figure out how to make it so :-)

[QUOTE=whpalmer4;110768]I think we are in agreement that it is often easier to determine that something could be better than to figure out how to make it so :-)[/QUOTE]

Yes and I am sure the day will come and Omnigroup will have figured it out ... ;)