Syncing in a heterogeneous environment
 

I just spent 30-40 minutes on my desktop Mac transcribing meeting notes into a client project. When I was done, I did a manual Sync to MobileMe.

Then I turned to my "idle" (dark screen) iBook with the intention of doing another Sync to make certain my task list would be up-to-date when I carried the iBook with me in the morning. When I woke the iBook from screen sleep, I was greeted with a notice that 1.7.1 was available. (I had already updated to 1.7.1 on my desktop Mac.)

"Ooops! I'm not running the same version on both Macs! Maybe I can update the iBook before the next auto-Sync." No such luck -- the iBook had synced about 10 minutes earlier. I've taken a quick look, and everything looks OK.

But this raises questions about the feasibility of syncing two instances of OmniFocus that are not identical. For example, ...

1. Is it safe to have two different releases of OmniFocus? (In the scenario above, the difference was only 1.7 vs. 1.7.1.)

2. What about OmniFocus on Snow Leopard vs. OmniFocus on Leopard? (My Mac Pro is soon going to leave its companion iBook G4 behind.)

-- Ward

OmniFocus 1.6.0 and earlier aren't going to be happy about the new database format, but they'll just fail to read it. (Possibly crash trying to do so.)

I ran 1.6.1 on my home machine while testing v1.7 here at work for a couple of weeks specifically to try and flush out any issues. (10.5 at home, 10.6 at work.)

Thus far, my data hasn't suffered any ill effects, and I'm not expecting 1.7 -> 1.7.1 to be any different.