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Hi Lucas, I assume your post was addressed to me?

Two reasons which I put above

1) I mainly use OF on iPad (98% of the time)
2) I like things checked off in OF as a record for myself of whether things were completed and if required, when.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffAirey View Post
Hi Lucas, I assume your post was addressed to me?

Two reasons which I put above

1) I mainly use OF on iPad (98% of the time)
2) I like things checked off in OF as a record for myself of whether things were completed and if required, when.
I understand what you're saying; the solution that I've described above doesn't depend on checking tasks off in iCal, checking tasks off in OF your mac, or using much of OF on the mac at all. The only thing it depends on is having iCal and OF *running* at least once a day so that new tasks are added to OF on the mac based around a certain schedule, which will then get synchronized to the iPad or whatever. I can't see a reason why the place where you check off tasks has any effect on that method.
 
I just found that this discussion ranks 5th in terms of replies on the forum and I found that I've been following it now since several years.

I know and appreciate that Omni makes very thoughtful decisions around which features to work on at what priority. Also everything is a question of resources. I've worked as a product manager in b2b IT, so I've faced these challenges myself. Omni has a fairly big portfolio of high class products that play on various devices - which experience enormous growth in popularity. All of which multiplies the sheer volume of tasks and complexity in product management. So my sympathy is with the Omni management who succeed at keeping quality and development speed up to their high standards despite of all the challenges of their own success.

Still, I'll quit following this particular thread now after several years of reading the back and forth.

I'm tired of reading how people religously defend and rate workarounds over(!) a feature which the entire industry regards as basic. No doubt - workarounds are a good thing and deserve our praise as long as they are needed for the lack of the real thing. But no longer than that.

I trust that Omni at some point will incorporate a rich repeat option ("every 3rd Friday of the month"). It'll help me automate many preparation tasks for recurring meetings, finances, hobby activities, etc. and thus get the workarounds out of my head into a system that I can trust even more.

Cheers everyone.
Chris

PS:
For those who still don't understand the difference between "every 3rd Friday of the month" and a selected "Friday every 4 weeks" - do yourself a favor and ask someone.

Last edited by c.nick; 2011-10-19 at 12:38 AM..
 
Some of us point out workarounds to help the people who feel they need such functionality, you know, actually get stuff done while they wait for this feature to be implemented! More than a few requestors of this feature are new to the product, probably also new to Omni and thus may not realize that a feature request is usually not fulfilled as quickly as one might wish. If you have a genuine need for some functionality, most would agree that means you need it now — I've yet to see someone say that they'll need more repeat options in 6 months, but are fine with the current ones for now!

We could endlessly debate Omni's original decision not to put in the richer repeat options initially. My take is that they probably made the right choice in terms of functionality, and anything that went into FCS was probably of more value to more customers than custom repeats. Which core feature would have been better to omit so that custom repeats could have been there for 1.0 instead? It is easier for someone building a new product to deliver yet another feature that seems like they need to have because everyone else has it than to figure out what is really most needed (take the brilliant implementation of reviews, for example). Thankfully, the guy steering Apple over the last decade wasn't like that!

Arguments along the lines of "even this low-budget app has custom repeats, why doesn't OmniFocus?" are silly, I think. If that other app is cheaper and does what you need, why are you using OmniFocus? The other app doesn't have some important feature that OmniFocus has? That feature is more important to you than custom repeats, you say? Hmm...perhaps Omni did do a better job of choosing which features to implement...

Last edited by whpalmer4; 2011-10-19 at 05:52 AM..
 
To be fair though, seeing the money I invested in three versions of OF I hold OF to higher standards than the low budged app you are comparing with. I get your argumentation and I agree that it comes down to prioritising features since you can not code them all at once. However, if one app costs me 3.99 and OF costs 40 then I expect more features, not a different selection.

Seeing how old this thread is I wonder why there has been so low priority for this feature. I myself have had situations in which I would have needed to set up a certain pattern (the 3. Friday of the month scenario is pretty common amongst business people) and OF could not offer me an elegant solution. It did not kill me but if many people need it and say so since 2007 then that's something I would rate important. But maybe there are reasons not to do it.
 
Is there any way to set up an action to repeat on, say, the third Friday in October every year?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by iriusman View Post
Is there any way to set up an action to repeat on, say, the third Friday in October every year?
No. You could pick October 20th of every year, but you can't have single repeating tasks which do something like you asked (or, say, repeat on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Friday of each week). You'd need multiple repeating tasks to do that.
 
I'd like to add my voice to the choir here asking for more robust options on repeating tasks. It's important to me to be able to have reminders for tasks that need to occur, say, ever fourth Thursday of the month. Appreciate your consideration for this capability.

-- Robert
 
Rodriguez, if you could contact the ninjas with a feature request, that would be grand.
 
Thank you Omni Group for OmniFocus 1.10.1! I have been waiting for the iPad update that corresponds to this update for a few weeks (since seeing the sneaky peek http://www.omnigroup.com/products/om...oad/sneakypeek) and it is out today! It looks like 1.14 has yet to make it to the store for iPhone as of right now.

This is a huge step forward and allows me to retire a few scripts I have been using as work arounds. I recently bought OmniFocus for a colleague and he just started using it this week. So glad to see this update and had to come back and find my first post ever on these forums.

It was interesting to read all the many posts of despair since I last posted. I just spent an hour reading them to see if anyone came up with a good solution to the repeat on every third Saturday of the month. I like the iCal script idea.

Quote:
Originally Posted by GeoffAirey View Post
I have several projects and tasks which I do two or three times a week, this leads to that number of identical copies which, when these require amendment, I have to amend the two or three copies individually.
It is really hard for me to find too many things that have really plagued me like the repeat feature. My workflow/workaround has been that I have a project for all my monthly actions that happen on a certain day and repeat them monthly. I put all of these in the same project (less then ideal) to make them easy to find and group. Then go through at the start of each month and move them to the right day. That way when they change I don't have to update a bunch of duplicates that I did at the start of the year when something is updated as GeoffAirey pointed out. This is similar to what whpalmer4's suggested in post 26.

Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
For the "day after Thanksgiving" task, put in a task every Nov. 1 to fix the start date for your "day after Thanksgiving" project for that year. Let the program help you help it do the things it can't do yet!
I am so glad to retire my scripts for weekday actions, that forward start and due dates by 2 days and that I don't have to be slowed down by reading them on Saturdays anymore!

Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
If it is important to me and there's a workaround, I can do it, with some inconvenience. If it is important to me and there isn't a workaround, I'm stuck. I'd rather be inconvenienced than stuck :-)
I agree, and between whpalmer4, Rob Trew and Curt Clifton they have helped solve 90+% of my OmniFocus problems. Whpalmer4’s scripting helped solve most of my biggest frustrations of working with repeating actions in other threads. Thank you Bill you're amazing!!!

I feel blessed that for my needs I don’t feel "stuck" on anything that readily comes to mind. There are many things that could be faster, but it is really about speed. This update is a greatly appreciated step in that direction.

http://www.macstories.net/stories/in...oups-ken-case/

"Don: Are there any plans to update OmniFocus for Mac this year?

Ken: Absolutely. There’s an update planned for this quarter for OmniFocus – not OmniFocus 2 to be clear, but we think a lot of customers will be really happy in what’s coming up in this release.

Don: You mentioned on your blog about possibly doing a bit of a visual upgrade to OmniFocus and pull over some of the features of the iPad app.

Ken: That’s not this quarter’s release either, but it’s work that’s in progress. This quarter’s release we thought we’d hop on a feature that is requested a lot and doesn’t require big changes to the user interface, rather than having people wait indefinitely for a feature they’ve been wanting a lot.
"

Thanks Ken for not holding this back until OmniFocus 2!! This seemed to be the biggest complaints people had with low star reviews on the App Store. I wish I could post there my appreciation and rave review but I didn't buy my copy through the app store (let more income go to Omni Group!)

Last edited by skillet; 2012-03-16 at 09:02 PM..
 
 


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