[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by StefMercury

I did smile reading your reply. I have a MacBook air!

Good. Use it. Stop wasting your time waiting for Omni to make square pegs to fit your round holes. I use all of the Omni apps on both Mac and iPad. It is clear that their design goal is not to provide iOS apps which offer all the functionality of the Mac apps, but rather a convenient, easy-to-use subset which meets the needs of the vast majority who do not need all the power of the Mac applications. Even if their intentions changed to provide iOS apps with all of the power, you don't have to be a long-time observer of the company's output to see that it won't be happening anytime soon. Just read the forum posts complaining that they have yet to implement this or that seemingly-easy-to-implement feature (many of which don't require much in the way of UI changes, either).

I propose something really simple. It's called OPTIONS! Sorry for the sarcasm but nothing I said is about FORCING people. It's about giving people options. You opt in. Or opt out. Simple! That way existing users can carry on with the attitude of business as usual. And for the rest of us - we have a tools which is far more flexible and challenge present thinking about how the software should work.

You might as well ask for options for the iPad to turn into a magic carpet.

I fiercely disagree with the old school attitude about what's the best platform and what can and cannot be done. Thank goodness Steve Jobs and the Apple team threw away that attitude and relandscaped the entire mobile industry.

If Steve thought that the iOS platforms ought to be fully functional Mac replacements, he hid this thought well. You mentioned the importance of email processing and document handling to you. On the Mac, it is trivial to compose an email and attach documents from two different applications. Try doing that on the iPad.

You can only do on the iOS platforms what Apple allows you to do. Apple does not provide a means to refer to an email message from another application like it does on the Mac, so no matter how much you might want it, you can't clip an email to OmniFocus and get a link that you can click to go back to the original message (like you get on the Mac). If you want to provide that functionality, the only way you can is to have OmniFocus retrieve all the mail from the server directly, and maintain a parallel copy. Oh, and provide functionality to replicate the Mail app so that you can actually do something with the message besides view it.

For me at least it's as simple as this.

If I open an email on an iOS device it should be a straight forward process to take it and task manage with it. There is absolutely no need to be using a desktop - or MacBook air - to do that kind of lifting. Attachments in iOS can use the OPEN IN feature as a bare minimum. That is just one classic example!

Sure, Omni could stop talking about eventually implementing Document Interchange and just do it. That would be a step forward. Then when you get the email with 3 attachments, you can click on one, do Open In..., send it to OmniFocus, where you'll have to tell OmniFocus what to do with it (make a new action or project, attach it to an existing one). Having done that, you'll have to switch back to Mail and do that process 2 more times for the other attachments. Somewhere along the line you'll also need to copy over the actual text content of the message. Or, you could do all of that in one step via the clipping tool on the Mac, today. If you get more than one or two emails per day that you need to handle in this fashion, insisting on doing it with the iPad or iPhone is a questionable use of your time.

And to be honest - why not add an email client into omnifocus! It doesn't need to do what other email clients do. It needs to be about creating things into the tasks that we need to manage! Apple may restrict things with iOS but great software developers should innovate around it!

Because it adds very little value for most customers, is a large amount of work, and Apple might say "no" after they do it? Hardly the investment with the best return they could make with their limited resources.

I agree entirely if you want to "hack" and play around with AppleScripts and many other things then yes - that is something for the desktop.

Or if you want to edit multiple items at once, build perspectives, use the duration estimates, project-based perspectives, review only a subset of your projects, etc. There's a reason why many of these features don't exist for the iOS apps; implementing them would force the apps away from the relatively clean, uncluttered experience they currently offer. Do a careful comparison between the Mac version and the iOS version of any of the Omni apps and you'll find that the features that don't appear in the iOS version almost invariably would involve substantially complicating the user interface.

Conservative attitudes prevent innovation. Too many GTD lovers think its THE only way and cannot be enhanced or improved upon with technology. The sad thing is none of that needs to be broken. The dinasaours can relax. Great software design can add the innovation WITHOUT upsetting them.

As for iOS devices - they are perfect tools to do way more than they do today. It's the very attitude of "they are not good for...." which prevents and stifles truly GREAT innovation and steps forward in software engineering.

IMHO of course :)

It goes without saying that there is much room for improvement. I certainly send in my share of enhancement suggestions. But in the end, do your customers and vendors cut you any slack because you chose to use your iPad to do your work inefficiently instead of your MacBook Air?