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Should there be a way to limit the info sent to iPhone Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I am just starting to use OF and loving it. Today I'm doing something that I'm not sure if is a good idea or not, and it relates to syncing with the iPhone. I sit on a certification review board and am preparing for an upcoming board. I need to review a number of candidate's certification packages. These come to me in Lotus Notes and are quite lengthy. I created a new project in OF and an action for each package I need to review. Then I thought, I'll just copy and past the packages into the actions so that I have one stop shopping. Now my mind has gone to "what happens when I sync this to the iPhone"? I'm wondering if there should be a way with the sync settings to limit the amount of data that gets synced to the iPhone. Many mobile mail clients let you set a limit of xxK of data that will be brought to the mobile client, or "headers only" so that the mobile client doesn't become filled with stuff. Wondering if this is a good idea?
 
There are certainly some situations that could benefit from this sort of feature, but it's also got a lot of issues, such as: how do we determine what information you need on the phone? What granularity, how does the user control this, how do we manage data integrity with an arbitrary number of clients syncing arbitrary amounts of data?

Your mail client example isn't a perfect parallel, as you don't modify received email messages (you may delete, forward, etc., but not modify the details), whereas you _can_ modify actions.

We may do some variant of this in the future, but it's certainly not imminent, I'm afraid.

The way people currently deal with this sort of thing is to put the "reference" data in a separate file (in TextEdit, OmniOutliner, etc) and provide a link to it in the action. I realize that's not as ideal as you probably want, but hopefully it's an approach that would work for you for now.
 
How about having a setting that leaves all attachments (either of all sizes or above a user defined size) on the WebDAV server until you click to download and view them, much like the way it works for attachments in Mail on the iPhone. Obviously, this would only function for people using WebDAV to synch.
 
That's conceivable. If that's something you would like to see, please send email feedback so the request will get tracked.
 
That would be a good feature, but isn't really what I was thinking about. I did test it on the current version and there are some problems with the current implementation. I'm not talking about attachments, but a rather large amount of formatted text copy/pasted into an Action's data area. When I selected it on the iPhone, the iPhone appeared to have locked up. There was no visible indicator that it was doing anything. The Home button didn't work either. After about a minute, I ended up reseting the device. I tried it again and waited longer... after several minutes it finally displayed the item. I would probably not try to do this again, and will look to probably put long entries like this in another file or something, although I'm not sure that doing that would give me the ability to read it offline with my iPhone. But currently the lack of feedback that its not "hung" is not ideal.
 
Well this is definitely a need for me now. I opened up a huge action on the iPhone and now whenever I try to open OF it hangs and goes back to the home page. I've deleted that material on the desktop but can't get OF to run so I can sync it and get the big actions out of there.
 
Is the desktop OmniFocus database up-to-date? If so, you can delete OmniFocus from your phone, which will also delete the database on the phone, then reinstall it and sync the data back down.

Then please send feedback to the OmniFocus for iPhone address describing the problem and how you got into the situation so that it will be tracked.
 
I finally got it to work after a couple of resets and a lot of patience. How I got into it was doing a copy/paste on something that was about a 65 page document into an Action Item. I probably wouldn't do this again, but that is the way the email came to me... yep, 65 pages of formatted text in the email, and I was trying to be pure in the way I was using OmniFocus. Bottom line is if you send this kind of thing to the iPhone, its going to bog you down. Ironically, once it loads it actually works fine for reading it, but the lag and apparent look that nothing is going on created the problems... and since I had last looked at this action, then when I came back into OF on the iPhone it kept on trying to re-open that same action.

My orginal suggestion was that you might want to just limit what you show for an action if someone does something silly like this... maybe right in the iPhone. Just open the first few pages and keep the rest hidden. Then maybe put a button to allow the person to open the whole thing and prevent any edits unless they do that. Probably 99% of the time it won't be an issue, but this would catch the few cases where you have someone doing something silly like this.
 
That is how it works in Mail for HTML messages on the iPhone - it downloads a certain amount of a message, displays that to you and offers you the opportunity to download the rest if you want/need to.

Btw, I have zero experience with attachments in OmniFocus (desktop or iPhone) as I never attach anything to my actions, so this is very low on my own list of priorities. ;)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by JKT View Post
That is how it works in Mail for HTML messages on the iPhone - it downloads a certain amount of a message, displays that to you and offers you the opportunity to download the rest if you want/need to.

Btw, I have zero experience with attachments in OmniFocus (desktop or iPhone) as I never attach anything to my actions, so this is very low on my own list of priorities. ;)
One thing to note is that I'm not really talking about an attachment (as in a Word document or something), I'm talking about a copy/paste of a document into the attachment space. After I printed it out and realized it was 65 pages, I realized it was kind of stupid to have done it.

I'm surprised you are using this feature though, as it is one of the most powerful parts of OmniFocus if you ask me. This is how I'm able to file all my emails and have all my InBaskets empty. I have links to the original emails, and usually the body of the email... so I can do everything from within OmniFocus, taking notes as I work an action and then when I'm ready to reply or something its right there for me to fire up a reply. If I had to rely on going back to my email systems and finding the information to reply it would be a big setback.

I use Mac Mail and Lotus Notes both quite a bit... so I always was struggling with two InBaskets if I tried to use the ToDo feature of either one. Now I've got a way to pull them all together, along with all my other ToDos. This just became a reality this week when I was able to start using iNotes, a browser based version of Notes so that I can capture a URL for an email message into OmniFocus.
 
 


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