[Dex]

Hi everyone, i'm a Windows user!
Yes they do still exist and if you know what your doing with it you can actually enjoy it too ;)

I recently bought an iPhone 3G and fell in love with Omnifocus as my mobile GTD solution which i sync through WebDAV to my own server..

Now, the only thing i'm really missing is a possiblity to view my tasks/projects/actions on my notebook. Which obviously isn't possible since there is no Omnifocus for Windows and i'm not expecting there to be one in the near future (correct me if i'm wrong).

So since my daily bread is working with Adobe Flex and Flash i was thinking of building my own little personalized Adobe AIR client which shouldn't be further impossible seeing that omnifocus generates xml files that are just packed in a zip on WebDav.

So, i was wondering, since i have a few questions i would like to ask about the xml, would a Dev be kind enough to help a poor Windows fellow out?

Which to me then also raises the question, would you guys be ok with me developing a windows capable client aslong as it's kept private? Or maybe you would actually be even interested in the client itself then? :)

Thanks in advance :)
Sandro

[Lizard]

Our apps use an open file format so you can do what you want with your data. It is YOURS, after all. If you do publish something, please make sure it's clear that it's your app, not ours.

On the other hand, we're still developing OmniFocus, so the file format probably will keep changing, and we won't necessarily announce every little change we make.

You're welcome to post questions about the file format here, or maybe in the OmniFocus Extras forum would be slightly better. I'll try to answer them if I can. However, our engineers are pretty busy finishing OmniFocus and probably won't have time to help.

[Dex]

first of all, thanks for this very positive answer! I'm glad to see that your not against my general idea. So here it is. I actually only have one particular question:

The id's i see generated in the xml. Here some examples:

<context id="aqmDESyYBMr">

<task id="bnl_e5-PKLo">

How exactly are they generated ? Is it some sort of hash or is there any logic to it?

[skarin]

I've been playing with this today as well. As far as I can tell it's a random 11 char string. My assumption is that that it is the unique key used to identify that object in the "database". I successfully created a new inbox task on my device by creating the proper files on my windows box and dropping them in my WebDav folder. So far I am keeping it simple and creating a windows app that acts as a "Quick Add" for creating a new item with a note in the inbox. I then go in and sort my inbox on my iPhone. Works pretty well so far.

Let me know if you come up with anything interesting yourself!

[Lizard]

As far as I know, those IDs are randomly generated. But I am not certain.

[skarin]

Safe to assume they need to be globally unique?

[Andrew]

Yes - if you use an identifier and it clashes with another client, Bad Things will happen.

[Dex]

cool! Thanks for the infos so far. I'll make sure to post my own findings as they happen :)

[Lizard]

Certain characters are not permissible in the identifiers, but I'm not sure which ones exactly. I recommend not using any characters that you haven't already seen used by OmniFocus itself.

[phanley]

I too am writing a OmniSync iPhone connector for Windows. I want to sync with Outlook using .NET. I appreciate the Omni Groups openness with the sync data.

I'm a hardware engineer during the day, so this is a weekend activity for me and it is slow going. But, I have the basics working, getting the XML zip files, extracting them and getting the data into my program. On the other side, I have access to Outlook's tasks and can generate/modify them. For me, now the next challenging part is figuring out how to map the content.xml information to Outlook. My goal is to have two-way sync with the iPhone so that Jello.Dashboard works in Outlook (seamlessly).

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Paul