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Reorder Flagged item? [A: Open feature request] Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
hopefully this feature will come soon :)
 
We've got a feature request open on this - attached you to the request so the rest of the team will know you'd like to see this added. Thanks!
 
+1 -- this would be very handy!
 
+2

Also, please allow manual sort in contexts, just like projects.
 
+100
This is my #1 request and it seems very easy to add.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Onazuka View Post
+100
This is my #1 request and it seems very easy to add.
Many things seem very easy when you aren't the one responsible for doing them...

Would you be happy if you spent time dragging your items into a specific order, and the next time you opened OmniFocus, they were no longer in that order? Or if you went to OmniFocus on another device and they were in a different order? Other people want to manually reorder other views, not just the flagged view. The same argument applies there. So now, OmniFocus has to store a whole new set of ordering information, and sync that information around, and these changes need to be rolled out simultaneously on all 3 apps (not something that happens very often). Is it still sounding very easy? :-)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
Many things seem very easy when you aren't the one responsible for doing them...

Would you be happy if you spent time dragging your items into a specific order, and the next time you opened OmniFocus, they were no longer in that order? Or if you went to OmniFocus on another device and they were in a different order? Other people want to manually reorder other views, not just the flagged view. The same argument applies there. So now, OmniFocus has to store a whole new set of ordering information, and sync that information around, and these changes need to be rolled out simultaneously on all 3 apps (not something that happens very often). Is it still sounding very easy? :-)
Interesting. I bet if OF ran a survey, they would find most customers only use one OF product at a time. Why not design for the majority? Even if a sort were required each time an OF variant were opened, how different could it be from that little database optimization dance OF iPhone already does? Add a few milliseconds? Design for the user, not the designer, and check your assumptions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-centered_design
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by Salient View Post
Interesting. I bet if OF ran a survey, they would find most customers only use one OF product at a time. Why not design for the majority? Even if a sort were required each time an OF variant were opened, how different could it be from that little database optimization dance OF iPhone already does? Add a few milliseconds? Design for the user, not the designer, and check your assumptions. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User-centered_design
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. The problem is not that it is going to take a little computational effort to rearrange the ordering when you launch OmniFocus. The problem is that each copy of OmniFocus needs to maintain that ordering, and so needs to communicate it by sync, through a file format that currently does not provide for doing so.

I do not think you will find that most OmniFocus users would be happy if they sorted the day's expected workload by priority on their desktop, then discovered as soon as they went elsewhere and pulled out their iPhone or iPad that their efforts were for naught (or worse yet, saw a stale version that gave no indication of being so).

If it were convenient to deploy such a change outside of a major release (where non-trivial changes to the file format are more reasonable), we probably would have seen it by now. Users have been asking for some variation of this for many years.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
I think you misunderstood what I was saying. The problem is not that it is going to take a little computational effort to rearrange the ordering when you launch OmniFocus. The problem is that each copy of OmniFocus needs to maintain that ordering, and so needs to communicate it by sync, through a file format that currently does not provide for doing so.

I do not think you will find that most OmniFocus users would be happy if they sorted the day's expected workload by priority on their desktop, then discovered as soon as they went elsewhere and pulled out their iPhone or iPad that their efforts were for naught (or worse yet, saw a stale version that gave no indication of being so).

If it were convenient to deploy such a change outside of a major release (where non-trivial changes to the file format are more reasonable), we probably would have seen it by now. Users have been asking for some variation of this for many years.
Thanks for the clarification. I actually did visualize that some power users (such as yourself) and enterprises would be working with desktop/ipad/iphone in unison, but still believe that would be the exception rather than the rule. However, should a manual sort for contexts, say, or flags be made available, how would that be different from rearranging projects on one device and watching that propagate to others in the fleet? Given that the developers want to design for the worst case, how then could they accommodate what I still contend is the majority user population? Easy: allow selectable configuration rules for those special cases that govern synchronization. It's also revealing that OF have users asking for something for years and not getting it.
 
The recent sync data post on the Omni blog said that about 20% of OmniFocus users using the Omni Sync Service use all 3 device types! About 33% of the users only use 1 device type. Of course, as outsiders, we don't have any idea of how many active OmniFocus users there might be that use other sync solutions, or don't sync at all. I don't know about you, but I'd be just as cranky to find out that my newly arranged data hadn't followed me to my other Mac as if it hadn't followed me to my iPad or iPhone. Syncing is an important part of the product, and I can't think of any real evidence to suggest that Omni would be willing to implement a feature which was effectively ignored by sync.

The difficulty is not just in writing the code (though there is some, to be sure). There is substantial difficulty in deploying changes to multiple interoperating products requiring extensive testing, documentation, etc. when you're a company that appears to have the resources to comfortably do only one at a time. Writing the user interface code here is not the tricky part!

Looking at it from a different angle: if we accept the proposition that this is an easy feature to do and it enjoys broad support, is there a rational explanation for why it hasn't been done yet that permits one any reason to hope that it ever will be? "This is a feature that needs to be deployed in a major release" hits that nail squarely on the head. "We can't figure out how to do it", "we don't think enough customers want that", "we don't think that has any place in our product" and other such constructions don't offer much hope of eventually seeing it. Do you prefer your requested feature in the future, or not at all? :-)
 
 


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