The Omni Group
These forums are now read-only. Please visit our new forums to participate in discussion. A new account will be required to post in the new forums. For more info on the switch, see this post. Thank you!

Go Back   The Omni Group Forums > OmniOutliner > OmniOutliner for iPad
FAQ Members List Calendar Search Today's Posts Mark Forums Read

 
The challenge of syncing OmniOutliner—solved! Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
You owe the long suffering OO users a solution for synching outlines between the iPad and Mac versions. I'm not asking for the 100%-perfect-in-all-cases solution. I need ANY solution - even one that comes with a ton of restrictions. We need something that works for "typical" outlines. Get off your developer's high horse and get real about this situation. At this point, you've led me (and everyone else) on long enough. You say that there has been progress, but I no longer believe that. From my perspective the odds that you'll pop up again with another "mea culpa" message is just as likely as the odds of us seeing an "It's Finished" message.

I'm sorry but you owe us a solution. A sync solution was promised (and implied) in the product back when it was first delivered. Again, ANY solution is better than more delays at this stage. Heck, just put up a web page with "officially sanctioned" steps for how to use Dropbox - ANYTHING!

You "went dark" on us for most of the year and are now dark again and we're supposed to trust you? Santra and others wrote very nice responses to your previous updates. While I felt similar to how they did at that time, the reality now is that you've used up all that good will. Stop "feeling bad" and do something, anything NOW. Stop tilting at windmills trying to get the perfect solution and give us a workable solution at least for "normal" outlines.

- Chip
 
There's been a solution all along. Use the Omni Sync Server to store your documents. When you want to open a document, copy it from the OSS to your iOS device (Macs can mount the server in the Finder). When you are done making changes, save or export back to the OSS. Yes, this isn't as speedy as making use of a local copy, but you don't have to worry about keeping the local copy up to date.
 
There's no need to trust them, by the way. Ken's just describing the current plan, without making any promises. It may or may not turn out the way he described, and if any sort of a schedule estimate was made, there's a high likelihood that it will turn out to be optimistic (this is not limited to Omni, btw). Only you are forcing you to use this software; if it doesn't meet your needs, you should find something else that does. If you are buying software because you expect it to add some feature not in the product at the time of your purchase, you need a contract promising delivery of that feature or you have no one to blame but yourself if it doesn't appear.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
There's no need to trust them, by the way. Ken's just describing the current plan, without making any promises. It may or may not turn out the way he described, and if any sort of a schedule estimate was made, there's a high likelihood that it will turn out to be optimistic (this is not limited to Omni, btw). Only you are forcing you to use this software; if it doesn't meet your needs, you should find something else that does. If you are buying software because you expect it to add some feature not in the product at the time of your purchase, you need a contract promising delivery of that feature or you have no one to blame but yourself if it doesn't appear.
What a colossally unhelpful Post. OG themselves recognise this as a big shortfall and it's fair for customers to note that too. Expecting sync in OO is pretty reasonable. It's an entry level requirement for multi-device software these days.

It undermines my confidence in OG as a whole.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by enrvuk View Post
a colossally unhelpful Post.
Now, now, there's no need to be so hard on yourself ;)
Quote:

OG themselves recognise this as a big shortfall and it's fair for customers to note that too. Expecting sync in OO is pretty reasonable. It's an entry level requirement for multi-device software these days.

It undermines my confidence in OG as a whole.
Is there any place on the product description where it is suggested that sync is provided, or even in development?

If you take the trouble to look, you'll find numerous statements by Omni to the effect that they only want you to buy and use their software if it meets your needs, and that if it doesn't, you should use something that does. They even offer a 30-day money back guarantee on their products (including those purchased through Apple, where making you whole costs them 43% more than they received from your purchase). Of course, if your choice is to stand around complaining about how the product is unusable, one might suspect you have made an error in forming your opinion, using "need" where "want" would have been more appropriate.

Which is more useful to you: an application which has an easy to use sync that gets your documents to all your devices with a minimum of fuss, but offers only weak beer when it comes to actually doing anything with the contents; or an application where moving files around is somewhat inconvenient, but which offers some utility in return? You ought to be able to find plenty of the former in the App Store for little or no charge.
 
What I find amusing is that OG recognise the failure but 'fans' get extremely defensive over criticism. The psychology of it cracks me up.
 
This cold-eyed rationalist realizes that the current situation (functional app, lacks automatic sync) is better than the alternative (functional automatic sync, lacks useful app), and is attempting to bring the light of reason to those have yet to open their eyes. If you have work that you need to do which requires an automatic sync solution, you need to find some other tool in the short term. Some people don't realize that Omni has a refund policy; others are emotionally trapped because "I spent all that money, I need to make this work!" and other examples of flawed reasoning. Then there are those who try to place the blame elsewhere for their failure to understand the product they bought, thinking "all programs do this" or "XYZ program has this feature and costs much less, so this program must surely have it!"

Yes, Omni made a choice, and it has not turned out as well as they hoped. Welcome to life.
 
Here's a suggestion for a strategy that may satisfy a large number of costumers for the short term and give OG more time (in terms of customer patience) to tackle the bigger problems that's been hindering them from introducing any automatic syncing (via Dropbox, iCloud, you name it...) at all - for such a painfully long time.

OG could introduce a new "slim" file format for OO with a limited feature set that's rather easy to sync. Extended features (images, audio notes etc.) could stay reserved to the current OO3 file format for which syncing will be introduced later. Think of something like .RTF and .RTFD! Or plain .HTML and .WEBARCHIVE!

So what if this new file format would only feature the most commonly used text attributes such as font-family, color, size, bold, italics, underline and strikethrough? Plus: colors for backgrounds, multiple columns, checkboxes and folding-states, of course. Basically, it could be something like OPML with text attributes.

I think this could make a *huge* number of people very happy. Whaddayasay?

Last edited by Ashcroft; 2012-10-25 at 04:34 AM..
 
Hi OO3-Users!

I'm also waiting for a comfortable solution regarding the syncing of my .oo3-files between iPad and iMac. Since DropBox and iCloud currently aren't working and probably won't be working in future either, I decided to try the Omni Sync Server.
Unfortunately, I have some problems with this way and I'm interested in if there is a way to solve them:
When I connect to the OSS via Finder on my iMac and it finally shows the files on the server, I am able to open one of the files by double-clicking it and then edit in in OO3. The problem: Often the changes are automatically saved to the server while I am about to edit the file - during this process I have to pause the editing and wait until the saving is finished. This happens too often, so I started to copy the file from the server to the desktop, edit it there and then copy it back when I'm finished. Additional workstep, but apparently necessary. The problem: Often after a while the connection to the OSS has broken: I can't simply move the edited file from the desktop to the OSS-folder (results in error message), but have to dis- and reconnect to the server first. A similar problem occurs, if i want to download another file from the OSS after having connected to it a while ago. Here also the connection seems to have broken: If I click on a file in the OSS-folder, it just disappears. Or if I click on it and try to drag it to the desktop, the transfer begins, but again results in an error message and fails. Here too I have to dis- and reconnect with OSS, then it works again.
Why is the connection to the OSS that instable? My connection to other servers like DropBox always works, I never have to renew it.
These problems make the OSS-solution completely annoying and inefficient...
Am I the only one with this instability-problem?
 
I use OF daily; sadly not the same for OO. Without the synch being more intuitive I have wasted my money on the various versions.

If I knew it would "never" synch easily, I would not have wasted my money.


Omni group support has always been great but unlike some, I do not add a program to decrease my efficiency.
 
 


Thread Tools Search this Thread
Search this Thread:

Advanced Search
Display Modes


Similar Threads
Thread Thread Starter Forum Replies Last Post
MobileMe "Root Transactions" problems [SOLVED: caused by iDisk syncing, see sticky.] codog24 iDisk/MobileMe/.Mac Syncing 27 2009-09-01 05:21 PM
My iTouch data is not syncing [SOLVED] Night_Sailor OmniFocus Syncing 2 2009-04-25 05:11 PM
[SOLVED] new update gives me eternal syncing DonLivingston OmniFocus Syncing 27 2008-09-04 07:23 AM
SOLVED: iphone items NOT syncing to mac Devo777 OmniFocus Syncing 5 2008-07-29 12:42 PM
SOLVED: Not syncing from iPhone > iDisk > Mac Roll OmniFocus for iPhone 13 2008-07-27 09:04 AM


All times are GMT -8. The time now is 08:26 PM.


Powered by vBulletin® Version 3.8.7
Copyright ©2000 - 2024, vBulletin Solutions, Inc.