new to omnifocus w/questions
 

and here they:

1. do you need to have the client software on the mac ?? (or can you just use the iphone version for all your to do's??) [i really only need it on the iphone, although i guess you would not get to show on your ical]

2. that leads me to my next question - how do you get your to do's to sync to the ical on a date and thus back to the iphone's cal?? i only see a list off to the side of the cal which really is no different than looking at the list in omnifocus

thanks

1. You don't technically need OmniFocus on the Mac to use OmniFocus on your iPhone. There's a few features from the Mac edition that are missing, but we're putting at least a couple of those into the next update (1.0.2). We do still recommend that you sync with a WebDAV server (such as MobileMe's iDisk) if you can. This gives you an extra backup copy of your data in case something happens to your iPhone.

2) The list in iCal off to the side is a "to do" list, so that's where we sync those to do's. The iCal sync is actually not so much for putting things in iCal as it is a go-between so people can sync between OmniFocus for Mac and various PDAs that can sync with iCal.
(At this point we leave the technical and enter the philosophical realm.) GTD distinguishes between 'hard landscape' and 'soft landscape.' Meetings and appointments, with their fixed start and end times, are hard landscape. These belong on your calendar. Actions which are not firmly scheduled (even if they have a deadline) are soft landscape and these are what OmniFocus was designed to track. There is at least one thread on this forum clamoring for OmniFocus to manage 'hard landscape' items and one begging us to sync to iCal as events instead of to do's. There are some complications with each of these changes, so I don't know when (if?) we'll implement them, but we are considering them.

thank you. i don't understand why OF has dates to schedule a TD (thus making them an event) and then does not use that info to post on a cal to give that perspective. i'm not sure this program is for me. i would like the option of having a task show in my cal

here's another way to put it - let's say you need to get down the action of sweeping out the garage and you schedule it for a thursday on a monday but your cal has an all day event thursday - that will not work - the cal and to do list NEED to be able to ''talk'' to one another or at least be able to look at your cal and see a ''conflict''. if i understand it currently CAN NOT do this correct??

[QUOTE=Lizard;42652]The iCal sync is actually not so much for putting things in iCal as it is a go-between so people can sync between OmniFocus for Mac and various PDAs that can sync with iCal.[/QUOTE]

Umm, well that's what it [I]should[/I] and could have been, but I put in a feature request several times on exactly this subject, and never did get a reply, either here or by e-mail.

I used a Pocket PC. The Pocket PC supports task start dates, as does sync services, but iCal doesn't. Tasks on the Pocket PC are no use at all (to me at least) without start dates.

Pocket PC's sync with iCal (or rather sync services) via The Missing Sync, and, critically, The Missing Sync syncs the Pocket PC's start dates to sync services, even though iCal can't read them. Obviously they "get" the concept of sharing data.

OmniFocus [I]doesn't[/I] (didn't?) sync start dates to sync services, so they don't get transfered to or read from the Pocket PC.

So, bottom line is, if you really do recognise that it's not iCal you're syncing to, but sync services instead, so that any number of other sync services clients can share data, you should be syncing EVERY piece of data that sync services can support, regardless of whether or not iCal can read it. The point is that you don't know what the "other" client supports, so should make all data available just in case.

If you'd done that, I'd have bought OmniFocus months ago, but instead bought Daylite because despite being crap, it does at least sync everything (once you get past all its bugs anyway).

Mark

[QUOTE=hocuspocus;42666]here's another way to put it - let's say you need to get down the action of sweeping out the garage and you schedule it for a thursday on a monday but your cal has an all day event thursday - that will not work - the cal and to do list NEED to be able to ''talk'' to one another or at least be able to look at your cal and see a ''conflict''. if i understand it currently CAN NOT do this correct??[/QUOTE]

Correct. OmniFocus does not handle things like appointments or events. In GTD terms, those "hard landscape" items belong on a calendar. And OmniFocus is for the "soft landscape", all those other things you need to do that don't have a scheduled time. Start dates are for indicating the first *possible* time you could do the action. End dates are generally deadlines.

For example, I can't buy that new movie until it's released on DVD next week. But I need to watch it before my cousin visits next month, so I can give it to her. So I set a start and due date, but it's not a scheduled event. I'm not going to watch the movie for 3 weeks straight!