[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by endoftheQ

Interesting! I suppose I'm relating it only to my own experience. Our team had a meeting a couple of weeks back about abandoning OmniFocus because of it's inability to attach pictures from within the App. The 20+ people who attended felt, with good cause, that the product had been mis-sold. It would have been easiest, from my point-of-view, to tell them they should post 1-star reviews on the App store and demand their money back from Apple, which although justifiable would probably have had a negative impact on bug fixes, development and future sales. Instead, I decided to take the time to come on the board, explain my problem and get people to email the Ninjas. Having done that, and felt that I was getting nowhere, I threw my toys out of the pram, mentioned mis-selling, and "hey bingo" we get an immediate work-around. I appreciate that you've been following this discussion, so you can see that even voting by email or posting threads in the past didn't help me and the other members for whom this was a problem. I feel that voting buttons would at least let all the board users see what things everyone is concerned with, albeit that they may not be typical end-users. For example, if I'd seen that 'Pick Photo bug to be fixed' was no.1, I'd have at least known there was a good chance it would be sorted in the near future. OK, I'm now off to find out what metadata is, and whether there's anything in it for us!

Well, a couple of comments, and remember that I don't work for Omni and thus don't have perfect knowledge of the situation, just observations on what I've seen as a customer over many years.

Looking back at the timeline for this particular issue, we see that in Nov 2008, keb152 pointed out the inability to attach images from the photo library on the iPhone. I certainly hadn't noticed -- I didn't get an iPod until the following April, and still don't use an iPhone. It may not have occurred to anyone at Omni to try attaching an image from the library instead of the camera, I don't know. 10 months later, someone else asked for the ability to attach images, I saw the post, went off to see what happens on the iPod, and discovered that iPod users weren't affected by the problem, which appears to be the point at which Omni noticed that there was a bug here. Somewhere around that time Apple rolled out copy/paste support for iPhone OS, and at some unknown time someone hitched it up to OmniFocus' attachment support, perhaps Ken. It appears that no mention of this made it into the release notes, unless I missed it in my search yesterday, and the manual hasn't been revised since March 2009, so there's no mention of it there either. There is mention of copy/paste support for things like text and actions in the release notes for OmniFocus iPhone 1.5-1.5.3.

So, you came along and squawked (not unreasonably) about this bug not being fixed, and someone from Omni who knew how to work around it posted a response (it does appear that they think that you should be able to pick images directly from the library without leaving OmniFocus, even though it can be accomplished via copy/paste). Expecting Omni to have gone through every post (or bug in the database) and determined whether or not it had been fixed by implementation of this feature and the new iPhone OS version is pretty unrealistic, I hope you'll agree. What is the difference between your latest post (where you tossed your toys out of the pram, as you put it) and the original one back in January? Almost certainly the difference is that your first one didn't happen to get read by someone who knew about the copy/paste trick and realized that it could be used to address this, and the second one did! (*) It is important to remember/realize that the forum isn't an official support channel where every message is guaranteed to be seen by an Omni staffer working on the relevant product and a response delivered -- it's rather intended as a place where users can help each other, with Omni staffers reading and responding on an as-available basis. If you really need a response, you need to be sure to contact the support ninjas, who have the tools (and responsibility) to make sure that nothing slips through the cracks. Contacting the forum in addition is fine, and probably much faster on the weekends and holidays when the Omni folks are outside enjoying the ever-present Seattle sunshine :)

I doubt the threat of forcing a refund of $400 had much to do with your getting a response. Omni is after all the only 3rd party developer I am aware of offering no questions asked refunds through the iTunes App store, even though that means refunding the 30% of the purchase price kept by Apple! See here: http://www.omnigroup.com/blog/entry/30_day_guarantee
If you called them up and told them sincerely that the software wasn't meeting your needs, my expectation is that they would first work with you to make sure your needs couldn't be met, and then cheerfully refund your money rather than having an unhappy customer. In this case, your problem was easily solved, and everyone is reasonably happy, no?

(*) Even someone who knew about the copy/paste support might not have realized that it would work for images, too. I knew that you could do copy/paste of actions and text, but didn't know about images as attachments.

[endoftheQ]

I'd agree with you, whpalmer4, except myself and others have been emailing the Ninja's about this, and regularly getting responses that they were aware of it and it was logged. I expected this to be fixed in the release before last, or worse case the last update, and it just didn't happen. So, instead of getting Pick Photo sorted, Omni gives me a whole new feature, Perspectives. I don't find this acceptable. I emailed, after each App update, asking why, and just kept getting the reply "sorry, we know about it, it's logged".

The OmniFocus App was sold (and is still being sold!) on the App store as being with the Pick Photo feature (see image). Nowhere does it say, "on the iPod Touch only". OK, we now have a lengthy workaround (copy-and-paste) thanks to Ken but I still expect the next release to have the Pick Photo feature included. I consider it generous of me to spend months trying to get them to sort this out instead of just taking more direct action. OK, you're right, a $400 buck refund isn't going to hurt Omni. However, it might be a bit different if a dozen 1-star reviews appeared on the UK and US App Stores, along with a complaint to the relevant authorities that the product was 'mis-sold' and a few emails to news groups and app reviewers such as MacWorld and TUAW stating we were asking for refunds because an advertised feature was not included. That could well do a lot more damage to Omni than refunding $400 bucks. I also imagine a lot of casual purchasers might ask for refunds even if the Pick Photo feature was of no interest to them just because they could.

I like Omni. I wouldn't be writing this if I didn't. However, I expect goods that I purchase to actually have the features that are shown at the point-of-sale and feel aggrieved about being continually fobbed off with "its logged" excuses month-after-month, release-after-release. I consider my restraint - up to this point - admirable!