With Omnifocus/iPhone do I need iCal sync anymore?
 

I've been using OmniFocus since last year (alpha) and got used to syncing it with the To-Do items in iCal.

Now I have an iPhone and OmniFocus for iPhone, which does a great job of keeping itself sync'd with the full program on my Mac using my .Mac (sorry, MobileMe) account.

My question is: What (if any) reasons are there for continuing to sync OmniFocus with iCal?
Thanks!

I'd be interested to hear what benefit it had before - given that (presumably) iCal and OF were on the same machine, what were you using the resultant todo's in iCal for? Maybe you were syncing with some other mobile device?

The only use I can see if you now have an iPhone would be if you need someone else or another app/device to see the todo's generated in OF. I use it to delegate todo's to my assistant (who also happens to be my wife!!!), and to receive todo's from her (yes I know - giving my wife permission and the method to add todo's directly to my inbox makes me insane!!). She doesn't use OF, and even if she did, wouldn't want her copy to be completely in sync with mine, so we sync certain contexts to iCal calendars.

Mark

I used to sync with a Treo 650, which is why I used iCal. When I upgraded to Leopard, iCal and Address Book would no longer sync with the Treo, in essence forcing me to get an iPhone (I was going to anyway).

[QUOTE=Dan;45716]I used to sync with a Treo 650, which is why I used iCal. When I upgraded to Leopard, iCal and Address Book would no longer sync with the Treo, in essence forcing me to get an iPhone (I was going to anyway).[/QUOTE]

Really? So Apple took you down a path that would result in you buying an Apple product? Surely not :eek: How very Microsoft (®©™) of them ;)

Seriously though, I didn't realise the Treo stopped syncing in Leopard. The 650 is Palm OS right? I thought you could still sync Palm OS with Leopard?

Leopard iCal would sync calendar entries only. Contacts and to-dos stopped syncing. Apple & Palm are supposedly "working out the issues."

I could've bought Missing Sync which no doubt would have done the trick, but I was ready for a change anyway.

So unless I want to start sharing to-dos with someone else, I should stop syncing OmniFocus with iCal altogether.

Yes, syncing with iCal is otherwise only necessary if you want to actually [i]see[/i] the tasks in iCal itself.

I sync a few selected contexts with iCal -- mostly household type stuff. This is partly because I don't necessarily fire up OF on the weekend just to check these routine tasks off, and I've also recently started sharing that task list with my wife via BusySync.

The iPhone's Calendar application has no to-do support [i]anyway[/i], so you're not going to gain anything iPhone-related by syncing your OF info into iCal. At best, you'd have your tasks available on the web via MobileMe, but this sounds rather irrelevant if they're already on your iPhone (and in a much more useful format and organization).

[QUOTE=jdh;46485] At best, you'd have your tasks available on the web via MobileMe, but this sounds rather irrelevant if they're already on your iPhone (and in a much more useful format and organization).[/QUOTE]
It's not possible to get to the MobileMe web interface from the iPhone anyway.

Mark

That's right also... I wasn't really thinking about using MobileMe on the iPhone in this case, but having access to it from secondary computers at work or school.

I work at a number of different clients, and don't always pull out my MacBook when I'm there, so sometimes MobileMe is useful for updating my calendar (it's faster and easier to type a few new appointments into a web browser than entering them on the iPhone). For [i]tasks[/i], however, I don't really see the usefulness, since there are better ways to handle new task entry (ie, "collection") into OF anyway.

There's one think iCal can do which OF can't on both Mac and iPhone... Alarms. With this native to both iPhone and Mac you don't need the iCal app open to have an alarm remind you of your next task.

Also it would be good to plan a particular day of various tasks in iCal based on the due date and time allocated in OF.

Unfortunately iCal's tasks don't handle time and only allocates a "day" due date.

Well, you can set an alarm for a task based on a time, so the due time from OF could be reflected somehow in the alarm time setting.

Again, however, this would only be practical on the desktop and not the iPhone, since iCal [i]tasks[/i] don't show up on the iPhone. Ergo, the alarms feature there would not be particularly useful unless you create your OF actions as calendar [i]events[/i] (appointments) rather than tasks. I don't think OF can do this natively, although I seem to recall that somebody posted an Applescript around here somewhere that could do this.