Time bug in relative date setting
 

Relative dates like "today" "tomorrow" "yesterday" can be entered in the fields of user-defined date columns in OO3.

There seems, however, to be a bug in the assignment of times to such dates ...

"Today" works as expected - assigning a time of "00:00", (which is incidentally the convention consistently used for start dates in OmniFocus)

"00:00" is also the time set if I manually enter a date like 06/06/2011 without specifying a time.

So far so good ...

"Yesterday" and "Tomorrow", however, both assign "12:00", creating an inconsistency in the data.

In fact, "last" and "next" (week month and year) all set a time of 12:00, while "Today" and manually entered literal dates set 00:00 ...

[As an aside, it becomes even more complex - if we use [B]Cmd /[/B] as a shortcut for entering today's date in a user-defined date column, even though no time is visible, a timestamp for the moment of use has been entered - but there is no trace in the data of which of these various date entry methods was used ...]

This inconsistency is an obstacle to simple filtering by date. If I filter rows for dates assuming a default time of "00:00", I will catch any that happen to have been set using a relative date of "Today", or a timeless date like "06/06/2011" but miss any that happen to have been set using other relative dates like "yesterday" and "tomorrow" or next or last week/month/year, or entered using Cmd /.

It seems unlikely that these inconsistencies are entirely by design ...

I don't have a strong view of what the default time should be (a mild preference for 00:00 perhaps) but a little more consistency and predictability would certainly be helpful.

(An option in Preferences, perhaps, as for the time of due dates in OmniFocus ?)

(I have forwarded this to 003 Help > Send Feedback)

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Should anyone want to 'clean' their date data (consistently normalize all unspecified times down to a base value like "00:00" or "12:00") this can, of course be done with applescript idioms like:

[CODE]on TimeLess(dteTime)
date (short date string of dteTime)
end TimeLess[/CODE]

Yeah, the inconsistency is definitely a problem. Writing this up. Thanks, Rob!

Hmmmm... I'm actually having trouble reproducing this.

Fired the app up with default preferences - v1.8, current sneaky peek.
Made a new project.
Showed start/due date columns
made "last year/month/week" actions, "yesterday/today/tomorrow" ones, and "next week/month/year" ones.

Used the keyboard to set the start date and due date for each row to the text that corresponded to the title of the action. For all 9 actions, I got 12AM in all the start cells, and 5pm in all the due cells.

Rob, what do you have set for your "default due time" preference. Maybe that's a factor? But if you're getting this in start cells as well, there's something else going on. :-/

Tried again, this time entering the text into the inspector instead of the completion cells in the outline; same results.

I'm sure my repro steps are a bit off here, Rob - pointers appreciated. :-)

OH LOOK, THIS IS IN THE OUTLINER FORUM.

No cookie for Brian. :-)

[QUOTE=Brian;79894]OH LOOK, THIS IS IN THE OUTLINER FORUM.

No cookie for Brian. :-)[/QUOTE]

Aha ... I was becoming puzzled :-)

(My fault for referring to two apps in one post ...)