Let me start just by applauding OmniFocus's developers for tackling the natural-language date/times at all. It's great!
But there are some that don't seem to work right:
- "next friday" currently (it's Thursday here right now) is equivalent to "tomorrow". "Next" in general seems to be just ignored. "Next Friday" should be 8 days from now. "Last" uses similar logic, so "last wednesday" is equivalent to "yesterday", which I also think is wrong.
- "5pm tomorrow" becomes "12/5/07 12:00 AM". That's just wrong. "tomorrow 5pm" does the right thing. It looks like in general that you have to specify time after you specify date. I keep forgetting to do that—can't both be accepted?
- "noon" and "midnight" are understood, and "afternoon" seems to be a synonym for "noon" (weird--maybe 3pm would be better?), but "morning" and "night" are equivalent (and both midnight), which is weird—though perhaps true in a technical sense, since midnight is both morning and night, I don't think it's a helpful interpretation. I think at one point "night" was set to 11pm, so perhaps there was a regression, but I may be imagining that. I'd suggest "morning" be 8 or 9am, "afternoon" be 2 or 3pm, "evening" be 7 or 8pm, "night" be 10 or 11pm.
- I keep wanting to use "eob" (end of business) or "cob" (close of business) or "eod" (end of day), since these are common terms in the workplace. Bizarrely, these all seem to get interpreted as the beginning of the current month.
- "This month" is interpreted at Dec. 10. I don't know why that is, shouldn't it be interpreted as Dec 1, or as "now"?
Maybe others can add examples of strange handling of English dates.
Again, it's nice that OmniFocus tries to handle English dates, but right now it's in a state where I can't really trust it—I feel I need to double-check the date in the inspector before committing, which makes quick entry a pain (since the only way to verify the full date/time in the Quick Entry window is to click the calendar icon).