[convergent]

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?

[Andrew]

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.

[JKT]

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.

[Andrew]

That's conceivable. If that's something you would like to see, please send email feedback so the request will get tracked.

[convergent]

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.

[convergent]

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.