[JKT]

Fwiw, the most important thing for me is to be able to set an alarm to warn me of upcoming events or critical deadlines that I can't miss in advance, not to see bars in iCal or any other application or on my phone. To dos just don't let me do this and the only way around it is to manually enter events in iCal which is laborious as well as reducing the usefulness of OmniFocus.

Perhaps one interface possibility would be to allow the addition of iCal events for projects, but only to dos for the actions. Personally, this still wouldn't be ideal for me but it might be a useful compromise.

[Brian]

Originally Posted by JKT

Not if it is created as an 'all day' event - it will span multiple days.

That's not what you were originally requesting, though. Ribbons across days were 'precisely' what you wanted to see.

[Brian]

Originally Posted by JKT

Fwiw, the most important thing for me is to be able to set an alarm to warn me of upcoming events or critical deadlines that I can't miss in advance, not to see bars in iCal or any other application or on my phone. To dos just don't let me do this and the only way around it is to manually enter events in iCal which is laborious as well as reducing the usefulness of OmniFocus.

Okay, maybe my coffee just hasn't kicked in, but in a previous post, you wanted notifications on your phone, but you appear to be backing away from that in this post.

If you only need notifications on your desktop, can you let me know what the existing growl support doesn't let you do? I'll be happy to write up feature requests as needed.

I think the thing that's going to be most helpful is if we have more feedback on how folks would prefer events/projects/actions that stretch over multiple days to be handled if we were to export them as events.

Case study:
I have a project that becomes available at start of day on Monday, and is due at end of day on Friday.

Would it be most useful in iCal as:

1. The ribbon approach I mentioned above. It's unlikely that we'd do this, but if you can convince us, more power to you. ;-)
2. A series of all-day events
3. An event at the date/time that marked the start, and another event that marked the date/time of the deadline
4. Some other method I haven't thought of. If so, please describe. ;-)

I can attach this feedback to the development database in the appropriate place for folks to review it.

[Toadling]

Is the "ribbon approach" an all-day event that spans multiple days (lozenge stretching horizontally across the top of the iCal week view) or a regular event with a specific start time and a multi-day duration (vertical event block covering multiple days)?

I'm not sure what the best approach is, but I'm very interested in hearing arguments for or against the options Brian has presented. A couple of points that come to mind:

1) An all-day event, or series of all-day events, seems to be a good approach at first. But how would a specific start/end time be designated? According to iCal, an all-day event beings and ends at midnight. What if mine was set to start at 9:00 AM in OmniFocus?

2) Two regular events, one to mark the start and one to mark the end, sounds intriguing. But what would the duration of those markers be? 30 minutes? 15 minutes? That seems like a hack. The problem is that iCal doesn't support a zero-length event that can be used as a time marker (with attached alarms, etc).

[JKT]

Sorry for the confusion - notifications on my Mac are the same as notifications on my phone (due to iSync), and it is my phone that is most important to me as I don't have a Mac at work so I rely on my phone and a PDF for my OmniFocus data. Also I really don't want to use a system hack like Growl and would rather use the built-in iCal.

Now you've got me thinking about it in more detail, I can see where the problem lies in how you could implement this so how about this for a suggested way of handling things:

1. Projects or actions that have set start and due dates (but have the default, unchanged times) are posted to iCal as all day events spanning the period in question.

2. Actions that have set start and due dates, with specific times set for one or the other or both are posted to iCal as timed events, starting and ending when specified.

3. Actions that have a start date but no due date are posted as all day events for the start date only (what would be particularly nice for this would be for the day to move up +1 each time you synched with iCal for each day you don't complete that task - iow it always remains a single day event, but always appears as scheduled for today following your 'Sync with iCal').

4. Actions that have no start and due date are posted to iCal as to dos only.

Ideally, you would be able to set multiple alarms on each event as a default (e.g. remind me 1 week in advance and 1 day in advance and 1 hour in advance, or any combination you like). There would need to be some means of choosing which actions received the alarms and which didn't... this does get quite complex doesn't it!

Alternatively, I ditch my crappy phone and get an iPhone 2.0 once it's released, so that I can use the OmniFocus app that you start shipping at the same time ;-)

[Brian]

Originally Posted by Toadling

Is the "ribbon approach" an all-day event that spans multiple days (lozenge stretching horizontally across the top of the iCal week view) or a regular event with a specific start time and a multi-day duration (vertical event block covering multiple days)?

Sorry for the confusion - the 'ribbon approach' refers to what you see in the screenshots I posted earlier in the thread. The vertical event block, in other words.

(JKT - I changed "all day 'ribbon' events" in your post to "all day events" to prevent further confusion. Apologies!)