Can't get alarms to work right
 

I am contemplating a migration from Toodledo and just downloaded OF for the Mac (trial) as well as OF for the iPhone.

Unfortunately, I am facing some problems with syncing my reminders.

1. Creating a task on the iPhone, with a due date and time, is indeed synced to my iCal on the Mac, and I get the reminder on the Mac as expected. For some reason, however, the alarm does not ring on the iPhone. After looking around in the iPhone calendar, I realized that the alarm event was not synced back via MobileMe to the iPhone. This is weird because, as I mentioned, the alarm even was clearly visible on the desktop version of iCal.

2. Creating a task on the Mac version of OF, with a due date and time, never produces a corresponding alarm event in iCal. This happens although I have subscribed to the "Omnifocus Reminders" calendar on my iDisk.

What is going wrong?

Thank you very much.

You need to subscribe to the "OmniFocus Reminders" calendar on your iPhone. Go to the settings screen in OmniFocus for iPhone and scroll near the bottom. Make sure calendar export is on. When activating it, OmniFocus will prompt you to subscribe to the calendar on your iPhone. After this procedure, you can view the subscription details from the Settings app (go to Mail, Contacts, Calendar under the Accounts section). From there, you may also want to turn on the "Use SSL" option.

Hope this helps.

-Dennis

Also, depending on your settings for how often calendar data on the iPhone is refreshed, you may not get an instantaneous change on the iPhone, even though the OmniFocus software on the iPhone is what changed the calendar! If the iPhone calendar app is only fetching that data every 15 minutes, and you add a last minute action with a due date in the next few minutes, there's a reasonable chance that the due date will arrive before the iPhone calendar app knows about the reminder. For this reason, even though I usually get very speedy response from this setup with MobileMe and push enabled, if I need an alert for something that is going to happen in the next 30 minutes or so, I use the Clock app to give me an (additional) alert. Most of the time I'm setting due dates at the least a few hours away, if not days, so it isn't a concern. However, if you're just trying out the feature, it's easy to run afoul of this because who wants to wait around for half an hour for their test alarm?

Thank you very much! This worked.