[Oogiem]

Pal OS had a very full featured repeating and calendar system for to do's back in 1996. I've not seen anything that even comes close since then. That's over 15 years ago and the programming for Palm OS was done even earlier!

I've been screaming for this request since I first got Omnifocus and I agree, this is or should be a high priority item as it makes OF a lot more useful.

Palm allowed a full range of repeats including saying to repeat every first x day of the month or the first and third or MWF or only weekends or nearly any combination. That robust repeating options are part of what made the original US Robotics Palm systems so good as PDAs!

Please Omni, get the stopgap out ASAP and then fix it to be as full featured as we had in decades past with other devices!

[Lizard]

Y'all might be interested in this: http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthread.php?t=23506

[Oogiem]

That is a baby step to the type of repeating actions we need, want and had a long time ago. It's a start but not even close to the power of what I lost moving to OF and iPhone from Palm!

[CatOne]

Originally Posted by Oogiem

That is a baby step to the type of repeating actions we need, want and had a long time ago. It's a start but not even close to the power of what I lost moving to OF and iPhone from Palm!

Maybe you could be helpful and articulate exactly what functionality was most useful in the Palm software.

"Make it what I had in Palm 15 years ago" isn't specific, and it isn't helpful. What specific things do you need, and which of those are the most important?

C'mon, people. Really.

[Oogiem]

I've done this before but here it is again.

Set a repeat to be any subset of specific days of the week, examples include every MWF, every T TH, only on Saturdays etc. Set repeats to be every weekday or every weekend day or every Sunday or combinations of the above. Set due dates as above.

Set a repeat based on day of month not specific date. Examples include Every 1st and 3rd Tuesday or every 3rd Saturday or Last Monday of the month. Or the first weekend of the month or the last or first weekday or 3rd weekday.

Set repeats based on quarters. So something could be set to be due 4 times a year on the 1st Wednesday of the quarter. Or started once a quarter on the second weekend of the quarter.

Set repeats based on half year items. As above

Setting flexible repeats that include both start and due dates. Start again X days after finish and then due x days after start. Or by the days of the week or by day of month not specific date or by quarter or half year as above. So you could do something like repeat item X starting on the 1st Monday of each month and due 2nd Friday of each month. Or start something first weekday of the quarter and due by the last weekday of the quarter.

As I said it was incredibly flexible and very powerful. Basically any way you could think of how to handle repeating actions was supported.

I miss that. I often have things that used all of the above ways of setting repeats and the OF method is totally inadequate.

[Lizard]

Oogiem
I think this feature fulfills the first paragraph of your list. There's now a row of 7 buttons, so you can click on or off any combination of days of the week. (Please correct me if I'm misunderstanding this request.)

We do not consider this to be the full set of repeating behaviors we want to support. It's just one small piece that we could do quickly (started after our most recent OmniFocus iOS release was completed), that would help a lot of people.

Thanks for taking the time to make sure we know specifically which other types of repeats would be most useful to you.

[Oogiem]

I'll be waiting till it comes out for real, I can;t do sneaky peeks, too risky for my critical OF data but I will be watching for it and will test it.

What about the setting both start and due dates issues? That is such a critical part of setting reasonable repeating actions. I nearly always want something to be both start on X and due by Y and there is no way to do that.

[Lizard]

I'm not sure I understand this "both start and due date" issue.

A repeating action can have both a start & a due date. When it is completed, the repeat of the action will have both its start & due date moved forward the same amount.
So if I set an action to start Feb 21 and due Feb 23 and have it repeat every 1 week, the next one will start Feb 28 & be due March 1.

I think it would help me if you could provide an example of the schedule you can't recreate.

[Oogiem]

Here are several things I can't do:

I need to set something that starts the first weekday of every month and is due 7 days later. Doesn't matter what day of the week or date the 1st weekday is.

I need to set something that starts the 2nd and 4th Tuesday of every month.

I need to set something that starts on the 1st Wednesday of the month and is due the 3rd Wednesday of the month.

Start the 1st week day of the month, due the 4th weekday of the month and repeats once every 3 months.

It's the combination of more flexible date repeats plus start and due dates that is missing. Typical examples include payroll data and tax stuff. Usually it has a cant' start before, is only on weekdays and has a due date some time after. The by date doesn't work because weekends are not counted.

The current sneaky peaks include a very welcome improvement in scripting control of repetition.

(A long-standing bug was that the choice between: Start again [N intervals] after completion, and Due again [N intervals] after completion, could be read through the Sqlite cache, but was neither readable nor writable through applescript).

The new scripting interface requires us to specify both a repetition method [due after completion | fixed repetition | start after completion] and a recurrence string which is described as: The iCalendar (RFC 2445) string describing the recurrence.

A sample string would be: "FREQ=WEEKLY;BYDAY=MO;WKST=SU"

(Looking for documentation of these strings, I notice that RFC 2445 is an obsolete standard, replaced in 2009 replaced by RFC 5545 ... Is this choice of an older standard by design ?)

--