[jdh]

Originally Posted by SpiralOcean

An example of a project with non repeating relative dates is...

Your example seems to suggest that you're talking about putting relative dates on distinct sequential actions rather than just between start date and due date on a single action. If so, that's definitely an intriguing idea and would be a great feature.

However, it also occurs that this starts to approach the functionality of full PM applications like OmniPlan, and probably isn't a simple thing to add to OmniFocus. While relative dates might work fine while things are lined up, what happens when you start moving tasks around, even within the same project, much less between projects. Dependencies and relative dates then have to be recalculated in a number of different ways. None of this is incredibly difficult, but it would likely require some more significant development effort than simply calculating relative dates within a single action. It might even require a complete rewrite of the way that OmniFocus currently handles inter-task dependencies.

Originally Posted by SpiralOcean

S+3d can be easily done in the head, unless we are closer to the end of a month. But longer dates can be problematic, especially with our lovely month system. S+30d is difficult to figure out in your head (unless you are a savant).

Fair enough, but if we're only talking about static calculations there are still other ways to handle it.... You can suffix most of the date shortcuts with an operator, so it's not too difficult to just copy-and-paste between fields and add a suffix like +30d. This doesn't seem to work with ALL date formats, but it works with enough to be practical, and I use it on a very regular basis.

For instance, I can enter "next tue + 30d" or "mar 13 + 5d" or even just "+15d" to calculate from today's date. For some reason numeric dates don't seem to work - "03/13/10 + 30d" simply results in 03/13/10 - but that seems to me like more of a bug.

Now, all of that having been said, I'm not against adding "S" and "D" variables to these calculations, but my real point is that if OG is going to do this at all, I'd really prefer to see it done such that a relative date entry remains a calculated value rather than just storing the static result. In other words, if you enter S+30d in the due date field, it should update automatically the next time you change the start date so that the interval remains at 30 days between the two dates. That would be far more useful, IMHO, than simply an extra date calculator variable.