How will OmniFocus relate to iOS 5?
 

Hi,

With the new structure of To-dos in iCal in iOS 5 and Lion, there seems to be something of a new location based-reminder scheme that seems quite neat. Getting a reminder of something to do where when you get to a location seems quite useful for errands especially. When you walk past a certain store, you get reminded that you need to buy something from there.. that sort of thing.

In my naïve understanding of things, it does not seem impossible for locations encoded in a task to be transferred to the iCal task when the two lists are synced. So, my question is: is this planend for omnifocus for the iOS?

/Fredrik

We're adding location-based reminders to OmniFocus directly, taking advantage of the context locations that you can already set in OmniFocus' map view.

Sounds great!

Will it be possible to have multiple map locations for a single context? I'm thinking here of multiple outlets of the same kind of store, post offices, etc.

Related: I'd love to be able to pin locations to specific tasks without setting up full-blown contexts for them. As an example, I keep a list of restaurants to check out in a project called "NYC restaurants". It would be very cool to be able to map that on the fly, but I don't want to clutter up my contexts with one-off that I might never visit more than once.

To sum up, mapping is awesome, but I think there are situations where it doesn't align exactly with the way contexts work now.

[QUOTE=avandelay;99456]
Related: I'd love to be able to pin locations to specific tasks without setting up full-blown contexts for them. As an example, I keep a list of restaurants to check out in a project called "NYC restaurants". It would be very cool to be able to map that on the fly, but I don't want to clutter up my contexts with one-off that I might never visit more than once. [/QUOTE]

You can do this particular case, at least, right now. Make yourself a context called "Restaurants to Try". You'll also need a project to stash actions in, your "NYC restaurants" will suffice or you could set up another if you want to use the project to drive regular exploratory visits. For the context, you're going to set it up with an "address or search" location, where you put in all the names or addresses of the places you'd like to explore, putting " around each location, and separating locations by OR, such as:

"Per Se" OR "Kuruma Zushi" OR "Babbo"

and selecting "Assign Search to Context" (rather than choosing a business from the resulting list).

Now put at least one action in the context (could be "Try a restaurant" set to repeat monthly if you want to try something new each month, for example). Whenever you bring up the Map display, the closest restaurant on your list will show up if you've got an available action in the context. If you want to look in a different area, you can drag and resize the map to show that area, and you'll be offered the opportunity to search again in the displayed area. When you've tried a restaurant you can just edit the location search to remove it.

I don't disagree that it would be occasionally handy to be able to have a one-off location search without setting up an additional context, but if your restaurants to try list had a lot of entries, having each one pop up on the map might be rather inconvenient when trying to use it for anything else. I suppose you could put the context or project on hold except when looking for a place to eat.