[LarryPerson]

Project (single actions)
-->Project (sequential)
------>Item #1
------>Item #2
------>Item #3

Items 1, 2 and 3 are complete.

The sequential project is not showing up in its context on the iPad. It does show up in its context on the iPhone.

This is a pretty serious issue and it renders the iPad app unusable for me (after shelling out $40). It's also extremely disappointing since OmniFocus is one of the two apps that motivated my purchase of the iPad.

Please fix!!!

[Brian]

Sorry for the trouble, LarryPerson! The first thing you'll want to do is make sure both devices are using the same view settings. If you tap the button that looks like an eye in the iPad app, does setting that to either "Remaining" or "All" cause the item in question to appear?

If not, the next thing I'd recommend was triggering a sync in OmniFocus for iPhone, then doing so in the iPad app. After the iPad finishes the sync, are you able to locate the item by name in OmniFocus for iPad's "Search" screen?

[noshirpatel]

I'm running into this as well.

Syncing between Mac, iPhone, and iPad, only the iPad fails to display actions that have had all their sub-actions completed (in Context View filtered by Available Actions, which is how most reasonable people would be filtering most of the time while completing actions I would think). It's very very easy to reproduce this problem and it works correctly in the iPhone version, so hopefully it will be easy to fix once it's acknowledged by the development team.

This really does make sub-tasks pretty useless in the iPad version.

[noshirpatel]

Hm. Also, both other platforms will show projects in the context view when they have no uncompleted tasks left. So you can mark the project complete without leaving the view. Not so with the iPad app. It seems that it treats any project or action with contained actions as items that don't appear in context view.

I haven't played much with repeating projects yet, but I suspect this could cause usability issues with this as well. (Having to switch to projects view to get to the project to mark it complete in order to activate a new instance of it.)

I certainly hope this is just a bug and not a conscious decision on how the iPad app should work.

[whpalmer4]

What do you have set for "In Context Mode: [] Show Projects and Action Groups" in the Data Preferences in OmniFocus on the Mac? If I check that box, and sync all my devices, the iPad and the iPhone both show me action groups and projects in their context mode views according to their availability. That setting is propagated via sync of the database, so if you change it, you need to sync the Mac and then sync the other device(s) after the Mac's sync has completed before the change is in effect everywhere. One tactic to make sure the devices are all on the same page is to change the setting, then add an action to the Inbox (on the device where the change was made) to serve as a marker. When all of the devices show that marker action, they should all have gotten the setting change as well.

[Ken Case]

Woops! Sorry, yes, this bug was caused by an accident of development timing: I originally introduced the ContextModeShowsParents setting on the Mac and iPhone (on 2010-01-21) and started out with it off by default so it matched the old behavior. A few weeks later I turned it on by default on the Mac and iPhone.

But what I missed was that we'd created the new iPad app just a few days earlier, copying that default "off" setting into the iPad app's default settings. If you update your setting on a Mac it gets copied around, and you get consistent behavior—which is why I've never noticed this myself—but if you've never changed the setting, you'll end up with inconsistent results between the iPad and the other editions.

I just filed a bug against the iPad app along with a quick patch to fix the issue.

[Ken Case]

P.S. — You don't have to wait for us to fix this in an update; you can adjust this setting on your iPad directly by visiting this Show or Hide Parents in OmniFocus Perspectives web page.

[noshirpatel]

Cool. Thanks for the quick response. Between this being fixed (well... worked around) and me figuring out that I can get fine grained view control by syncing perspectives from the mac version I'm really starting to like this app. (Too bad perpectives can't be edited at the iPad. Being able to fully do that, including setting the set of selected contexts for a perspective, would really make it fully functional and free it from the mac.)