Quick Entry on the iPhone
 

IMO, one of OF-for-the-desktop's greatest features is Quick Entry. Having a keyboard shortcut to drop something in the inbox from anywhere in the OS means the effort involved is so low that I end up doing much, much more often.

I'd love to see "quick entry" for the iPhone implemented as a separate root-menu applicaton icon I could click that would take me directly into the Quick Entry flow. And quickly -- maybe it could be a separate, smaller app with a little memory footprint. Yeah, it only saves one click -- but that's a click with a pretty big impact on usability.

Thanks for considering.

great idea
 

I like the idea but in my humble opinion I don't think it is possible because of how the iPhone itself works.

Apple does currently not allow 'background applications' to operate on the iPhone...thus there would be no program to monitor for such a key event.

(I just mentioned this in another thread, but it's as easy to repost it here as it is to point you there!)

We thought of doing a Quick Entry companion app, but each iPhone app is placed in a sandbox so that it can only access its own files—which is a good general policy, but unfortunately means that if we create two apps they won't be able to see each other's data.

Maybe there can be a preference in the app that you can set to launch into some quick entry mode without loading the full database for people who want that functionality -- and if you don't want quick entry, it's just one button to go to the full mode.

I would probably use the quick entry at 3x as often as going to actually view tasks.

+1 on a preference to have the home screen act as a quick entry form.

I planned on using the iphone app primarily as a ubiquitous capture device, but am finding the capture a little too cumbersome. Audio recording is a great feature, but it needs to be quicker to use. If a user needs to capture via audio then I think it's safe to assume they are either in a car, or in a hurry. It currently takes 4 taps to start recording, not including waking the iphone up.

- start omnifocus
- add new task
- click done on keyboard, as it's not being used
- record audio

It would be nice to get it down to 2 taps.

joshua

What if the second "Quick Entry" app just synced with the remote data store to share data with the main OmniFocus iPhone app? Maybe that's a bit cumbersome, I don't know. Of course, it also wouldn't be a great solution for any iPhone-only customer who aren't already syncing with a remote server.

-Dennis

+1 on a Quick Entry screen and preference. I want to just start up OF and have an easy easy easy way to jot down some thoughts, tasks, etc.

A even better idea would be able to just give me a blank page (like a note) and let me type stuff out. At the end, just turn every line into a inbox item (action). You could even follow the old rules of: stuff > project @ context

Example:

buy mike > single @ errands
bring school to work > bike project @ work
toadline about dinner > dinner plans @ calls

When I hit Save it would try to match up the projects and contexts to real things. If it couldn't find it, would just dump it to the inbox. Very much like how Kinkless handled it.

BZ

I thought I saw in a previous post where Ken had mentioned that they were looking at being able to add directly to inbox while the "loading" message was going?

Couldn't a quick entry app get the inbox item into omnifocus using a custom URI? Something like this [url]http://inik.net/omnifocus-uri-handler[/url].

Last.fm has custom links on their site when you browse it with an iphone that will open up the last.fm iphone app ([url]http://blog.last.fm/2008/07/13/lastfm-for-iphone-and-ipod-touch[/url]), so it should be possible.

I don't think this could work for audio, or pictures because of the app sandboxing, but I don't see any reason you couldn't get tasks in.

joshua

[QUOTE=dhassell;40935]Maybe there can be a preference in the app that you can set to launch into some quick entry mode without loading the full database for people who want that functionality -- and if you don't want quick entry, it's just one button to go to the full mode.

I would probably use the quick entry at 3x as often as going to actually view tasks.[/QUOTE]

+1 for this idea.

Someone else suggested a separate, standalone app that just submits additions to the central data store on MobileMe/WebDAV, bypassing the need to access the iPhone's local OF database. That seems like an acceptable workaround too.