[endoftheQ]

Thanks for taking the time out to respond Bill, you'll be humbled to know I'm always agog with anticipation awaiting your responses to my rants!

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

They don't actually say that the items on the list will be worked in order of popularity, just that it is a factor in their decision-making. If they are working on a particular area of the app in a release, I would expect that they would go take a look at related requests further down the list. If something is a very popular request, but implementing it would be too destabilizing for a minor release, I would expect it to be pushed off into the next major release. That's certainly what happened with OmniPlan.

OK, fair enough, except that the delays between releases drift at a glacial pace. You know how that delights me.

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

As for attaching contacts to actions being a universally desired addition, I know of one person who has never jumped on that bandwagon. My view is that either I expect to call this person repeatedly, in which case I'll put them in the address book and the phone will have it, or it's someone I'm going to call once, in which case address book integration is irrelevant, because the contact won't be in there. Now, I hear you saying "but you'll have to get the phone to look up the number in the address book when you go to make the call" — and my answer is that I would also have to do that same operation to attach the contact to the action. From my vantage point, Omni has allocated the proper amount of resources to this feature :-)

Oh, so the current method works just fine in your case, you selfish %^& *& * ( !@ [edited by Brian]. I'm guessing that about half my actions require some form of communication, and with thousands of contacts, an action that says 'Ask John about widgets' becomes meaningless in a week-or-so. In OF on the desktop, I'll type 'Ask' and then drag the relevant contact 'John' to the action then type 'about widgets', which works absolutely perfectly in desktop OF. It just needs fixing to generate the same live link in iOS, as you get with a StOF, instead of the current non-working link. I think maybe it's time I should pay a developer to sort this out just for me, huh?

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

I'm pretty sure I described how you can do this, but it does require tools not found in the app. I'd characterize it as tedious, but not impossible — the sort of thing I would do once for a friend, but with the understanding that they would watch and take careful notes, because the surgeon's mantra would apply: "see one, do one, teach one" :-)

I don't recall the exact details, but I think the Member was on the other side of the globe, had just bought OF, taken pictures or audio and didn't own a computer. I'm still convinced that it would take Ken little more than his coffee break to code 'email out' into iPhone OF and put an end to this only-have-an-iPhone "what now?" scenario once-and-for-all. I know better than to ever put anything in OF that I'll need to get out whilst on the go, but that's not exactly a productive methodology as it negates me ever using any attachments.

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

I share some of your unhappiness here. I think there is a substantial set of users for which OmniFocus on iPad is a very reasonable standalone tool. There are others who could be quickly migrated into that set with a small number of changes, with many of those changes being small-scaled compared to enhancements like supporting creating perspectives or possibly the Document Interchange work.

Is what I'm asking small-scale and will only involve Ken skipping lunch, or is it hundreds of man-hours and I'm going to have to continue to wait until the next ice-age, given the carousel of Omni's other app developments? I'd really like to know. For example, Document Interchange is an iOS function not an OF one, the same as the preview you currently get when you tap on an attachment. If you hold down you should get the iOS 'Open in' list, so if I'm kicking my heels waiting for a client, I tap and hold on a PDF attachment that's in OF and needs marking up and 'Open in' say Goodreader and start being productive.

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

There are also people who will find it frustrating not to have all of the power of the desktop version, but that is impossible to provide, and I hope you agree that can't be the only metric for whether or not it is a standalone product. Personally, I do manage to use the iPad for most of my OmniFocus work, even when I'm sitting at the Mac, and I think a few more changes like the Forecast view sort option recently given to the iPhone could cover quite a bit of ground for the Mac-less without having to build a UI for constructing perspectives, for example.

I'm in awe of your abilities with the iPad, I nearly always carry my Air in preference. I agree with you that it's unrealistic to expect the functionality of the desktop, with the caveat that including features such as camera, audio, attachments, etc. when there is no way of exporting them (iPhone) is a benchmark of something that isn't any kind of standalone product. I've always genuinely believed that significant feature requests especially if they might impact on methodology should be the purview of the Fundi's like yourself. Metadata (the theme of this thread before I did my usual hijack) has always had its supporters and detractors and again I think it has topped the charts on many occasions. I think field tags would be a plus, simply because new users can add in hundreds of tags and then slowly get to grips with contexts rather than adding in hundreds of contexts and then getting frustrated. However, whether it actually would be a good thing, I freely admit I've not the perception or experience to know. However, I can't see an argument against searching in the notes field, which would allow the kludge of #cancel, #relocate, etc. so when disaster strikes there's an out, and I honestly believe notes searching is of general benefit anyway in the day-to-day use of the app.

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

I use drag and drop in the iPad OF pretty much every time I edit a project. Perhaps we have different ideas about what that means. I'm reshuffling actions in a project, not trying to assign actions to projects. I don't think the latter would work well with more than a dozen or so projects; I don't think it works particularly well on the Mac, either.

Unfortunately, my workflow usually requires me to hack bleeding chunks out of projects and move them to another one on a day-to-day basis, given an infinite number of scenarios and possibilities that can include something as vague as the weather. It's not great on the Mac but it's hideous on iDevices.

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

No, I didn't say I could search the notes field on the iOS devices.

OH, YES YOU DID!!

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

"I don't know why the search doesn't handle notes, although perhaps there's a performance issue there. Most people I know with an iPad use it instead of the iPhone. No comfort if you don't have an iPad or don't have it with you, of course, but at least the functionality is there on one platform, unlike some of your wish list items."

OK, moving swiftly on....

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

Moving actions between projects on the iPhone is possible. For details, send $19.95 plus $5.95 s/h to me at my paypal account :-)
Here's the trick: you edit the project containing the errant action. Select the action, tap on the project field, and assign the new project.

Huh! I didn't think to play the Project not the Action. I'm grateful, as always, for you're willingness to share your wisdom and experience, much appreciated.

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

Oh, nothing, of course, just an illustration that some people are never satisfied, no matter how much you give them (I'm a proud member of this club!)

There's dozens of things I think OG should have done, record(action)locking, port-to-PC, OO-to-iPhone first, shared single-action lists, etc. etc. ad infinitum but have always accepted that these might never make any list, even if IMHO they make good business sense. OF on the desktop doesn't owe me a penny, I've definitely had my money's worth. OF on iDevices, sans core iOS functionality, not so much. In fact, it's been a real clunky disappointment that appears to show no sign of improving any time soon. :(

[endoftheQ]

Originally Posted by Brian

I was actually in London around Christmas and did some testing in the Stepney Green area but couldn't get the problem to reproduce for me. OmniFocus and the Maps app were both able to locate the building I was staying in based on the post code.

Frustrating, and doubly so because I'll have fewer opportunities to visit your fair country in the future, I'm afraid.

Aw, thank you so much for trying, Brian. I've long since accepted that the OR function is like that senile old tart Siri, somewhat disorientated outside the USA. It's irritating but hardly the end of the world!

I hope you make it back to these shores sometime soon, I've never understood how you can bear to live in a country where you can't use buses!

[endoftheQ]

Originally Posted by Brian

In OmniFocus for iPhone, tap and hold on an items' checkbox to bring up the cut/copy popover. My non-engineer's understanding is that the behavior we use on the iPad wasn't available on the iPhone when we coded that up.

I'll file a feature request just in case later versions of iOS make the iPad behavior possible via the iPhone APIs. That may or may not be the case.

Easter Eggs, Brian? Really??! Oh, and whpalmer4 palms me off with some out-of-date rigmarole of a workaround? Nice. OK, off to book essential therapy to deal with the imagery of you and him in the woodshed together. Hey, it's either that or I bring the axe.

Happy Holidays!

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by endoftheQ

Thanks for taking the time out to respond Bill, you'll be humbled to know I'm always agog with anticipation awaiting your responses to my rants!

An odd little co-dependency we share :-)

OK, fair enough, except that the delays between releases drift at a glacial pace. You know how that delights me.

Hey, I hear you. I made a suggestion over a year ago, in response to some poor fellow who'd been pulling his hair out trying to get the mail rule working. I supplied tested code — a one line patch to the AppleScript — so someone who had made the same mistake would at least get a warning message in the console log. It was cheerfully accepted. Some time goes by, a minor release comes out without this change, and I send a chiding message about how I was trying to make their life easier, giving them code that would ease their support burden, and it goes the way of the 100 mpg carburetor. A year later, having tired of reapplying this change to each sneaky peek that came down the pipe, I got tripped up by the same problem, and after wasting a bunch of time chasing it down, sent a cranky message to Brian and Ken. No response, but a few days later, a sneaky peek comes out with a change in the Mail rule for improved logging! Great! I download that sucker and continue on. After a week or two, I notice that my Inbox doesn't have as much stuff in it as I expect (more than it should, granted!) and in particular, stuff that normally gets inserted by the Mail rule doesn't seem to be there. Now, a lot of that traffic I was expecting related to OmniPlan for iPad testing, and Aaron had yet to set up an auto-responder, so it wasn't a clear-cut case of "I sent in a message and didn't get a response" and so it was only when another sneaky peek showed up and I saw the description again that the lightbulb glowed feebly and I got suspicious. A few minutes of poking around and I had my culprit: my change wasn't sexy enough, so it had been improved upon. No doubt the improvement is just that, except that it apparently didn't occur to anyone to make sure it actually was legal AppleScript for all versions of Mac OS X! I promptly filed the most civil bug report I could produce, pointed out the offending bit in the script, and got back a response thanking me and apologizing for the inconvenience. Another sneaky peek came out a few days later, now two full Omni work weeks ago. Still broken, no attempt at a fix. Yeah, it's a sneaky peek build. Sometimes they are broken. Not clear how leaving it broken is in anyone's interest — fix it, or back it out.

Just before I read your post, I was answering an email from one of the ninjas about a bug report I made yesterday. He referenced a blast from the past — a report I'd made, positively giddy that I finally had a recipe to reproduce this elusive bug that had been present in OmniFocus from the beginning, a bug that Ken had told me at Macworld hadn't been fixed because no one was able to reproduce it. The date on that report? Dec. 2009. Now, in fairness, I didn't actually supply working code for this one, so I suppose I should be more patient :-)

Oh, so the current method works just fine in your case, you selfish %^& *& * ( !@ [edited by Brian]. I'm guessing that about half my actions require some form of communication, and with thousands of contacts, an action that says 'Ask John about widgets' becomes meaningless in a week-or-so. In OF on the desktop, I'll type 'Ask' and then drag the relevant contact 'John' to the action then type 'about widgets', which works absolutely perfectly in desktop OF. It just needs fixing to generate the same live link in iOS, as you get with a StOF, instead of the current non-working link. I think maybe it's time I should pay a developer to sort this out just for me, huh?[

Okay, I see how not having the actual contact could be an issue for you, though don't you still want to know which John it is before he answers? I assume you have a far-flung empire of widget builders! I did some poking around at this way back when, and I concluded that the Contacts app in iOS just doesn't have a compatible token you could stick in your action for reference, just like the Mail app in iOS doesn't handle message: links. That means Omni either copies the data from the contact as it stood at the time you made the action (feasible, but risks stale information), or somehow maintains a mapping to the contact in the action and fetches the proper contact through whatever means is available for the platform you're on.

I don't recall the exact details, but I think the Member was on the other side of the globe, had just bought OF, taken pictures or audio and didn't own a computer.

Okay, the difficulty factor is getting higher :-)

I'm still convinced that it would take Ken little more than his coffee break to code 'email out' into iPhone OF and put an end to this only-have-an-iPhone "what now?" scenario once-and-for-all.

It does seem to be a point of pride at Omni to not do any work on the weekends or perhaps even in the evenings. My former employer had the collective wisdom to realize that if they provided us with the necessary hardware and connection, most of the engineering staff would work plenty of extra hours after going home, and little stuff would get knocked off without interfering with the big goals. Occasionally, people even managed to have social lives and families, though the more productive engineers usually steered clear of that sort of thing :-)

I agree that having already solved the problem once for the iPad, the effort to do it for the iPhone app should be much reduced.

Is what I'm asking small-scale and will only involve Ken skipping lunch, or is it hundreds of man-hours and I'm going to have to continue to wait until the next ice-age, given the carousel of Omni's other app developments? I'd really like to know. For example, Document Interchange is an iOS function not an OF one, the same as the preview you currently get when you tap on an attachment. If you hold down you should get the iOS 'Open in' list, so if I'm kicking my heels waiting for a client, I tap and hold on a PDF attachment that's in OF and needs marking up and 'Open in' say Goodreader and start being productive.

I can hear you laughing already, but I think there is a desire to not produce a mish-mash of half-baked hacks. I remember Ken talking about how he wanted to be able to send things into OmniFocus, not just out, and that seems more involved to me than just hooking up the means to export something. And aren't you going to expect to shove that PDF back into your OmniFocus action after you've marked it up, so it gets synced to your desktop?

However, I can't see an argument against searching in the notes field, which would allow the kludge of #cancel, #relocate, etc. so when disaster strikes there's an out, and I honestly believe notes searching is of general benefit anyway in the day-to-day use of the app.

The only (potential) reason I can think of is performance. Right after filing the bug report mentioned above I was filing another with the 1Password folks, complaining that I'd been misled because their search field in the iPad app didn't search everything, unlike their Mac app (sound familiar?) and the answer that came back was that originally they'd had performance issues searching everything, but now that the hardware had improved, they were revisiting this decision. Maybe Omni will do the same.

Unfortunately, my workflow usually requires me to hack bleeding chunks out of projects and move them to another one on a day-to-day basis, given an infinite number of scenarios and possibilities that can include something as vague as the weather. It's not great on the Mac but it's hideous on iDevices.

On the iPad, you can copy and paste action groups. If the bleeding chunk is contained in one, it's easily copied and pasted into the destination. Otherwise, if you are sacrificing the source project, it can be converted back to an action (group), then assigned to real destination. If you need to keep the source project, making it a repeating project, marking it complete, then marking incomplete (and removing the repeat) will get you a duplicate.

OH, YES YOU DID!!

No, I didn't, but I can see how you might think that I did. The "it" I was referring to when I said that one platform had it was the "Mail action" feature. You know, the one we were discussing a few paragraphs ago :-)

Huh! I didn't think to play the Project not the Action. I'm grateful, as always, for you're willingness to share your wisdom and experience, much appreciated.

It's not exactly healing the sick, but the gratitude that is often expressed is what keeps me coming back. Oh, and my favorite XKCD cartoon:



p.s. My way is better than Brian's way, as you'll discover when you try his :-)

[endoftheQ]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

Hey, I hear you. I made a suggestion over a year ago...

I've always been incredibly appreciative of the massive amount of work you and other Members have put in to OF and the willingness to help those of us who get lost in the complexity. I'm back using it full-time because I've been banned from our work GTD system until I complete a project. It's a bit like meeting up with an old friend, even if I'm not over-fond of the children!

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

I did some poking around at this way back when, and I concluded that the Contacts app in iOS just doesn't have a compatible token you could stick in your action for reference, just like the Mail app in iOS doesn't handle message: links. That means Omni either copies the data from the contact as it stood at the time you made the action (feasible, but risks stale information), or somehow maintains a mapping to the contact in the action and fetches the proper contact through whatever means is available for the platform you're on.

I didn't know you'd had a poke! It's certainly seems possible because other apps manage it. It's also a bit odd that even if I cmd-drag a contact to an action on OF desktop, it puts in the .vcf as an attachment, but OF on iOS can't view it. I guess I'll have to break my rule about not contacting devs. re: StOF and ask for this to be added to an app as a favour. I promise you there's nothing more boring than having to call a contact half-a-dozen times, switching between OF and rifling through contacts, before you can tick that box.

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

It does seem to be a point of pride at Omni to not do any work.

I so knew it. :p

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

I can hear you laughing already, but I think there is a desire to not produce a mish-mash of half-baked hacks. I remember Ken talking about how he wanted to be able to send things into OmniFocus, not just out, and that seems more involved to me than just hooking up the means to export something. And aren't you going to expect to shove that PDF back into your OmniFocus action after you've marked it up, so it gets synced to your desktop?

ROFL. So, by that argument, if I can't email in, I shouldn't be able to email out?! I s'pose if you don't already make heavy use of Document Interchange with other apps, you might not be hankering after its versatility, for example if someone emails me a file that I want to modify, I just tap and hold the attachment in the email to see my options, courtesy of DI. Besides, if OG enable DI both ways, when you 'Open in OmniFocus' from say Goodreader you'd get a new action in your inbox with the revised PDF as an attachment.

I asked a mate last week to interview and publish an AppSynergy review on Evernote, which in hindsight was how I thought OF would evolve, after Ken posted the code for StOF. I undoubtedly misled myself, envisaging OF as a hub, interacting with a vast array of other apps. For example, I just can't get creative over a project's actions in OF, I want to take them out and play with them, maybe in iThoughts or iMandalart, then put the results back. I've also admittedly tried many times to manage attachments by integrating with DevonThink but always end up feeling like I'm auditioning for a bit part in the Big Bang Theory. I have no doubt that I lack the discipline and patience to go Fundi. It'll always be about how many boxes I ticked, not how or where I ticked them, which is why I'm comfortable delegating categories such as shopping lists and travel to other apps that are more productive than OF or my work GTD system in such specific areas.

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

On the iPad, you can copy and paste action groups.

As always, I very much appreciate these workarounds, thank you!

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

No, I didn't, but I can see how you might think that I did. The "it" I was referring to when I said that one platform had it was the "Mail action" feature. You know, the one we were discussing a few paragraphs ago :-)

Nice save. ;)

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

p.s. My way is better than Brian's way, as you'll discover when you try his :-)

No surprise there then. Just between ourselves, I can't believe he tried to replicate the location 'OR' bug in Stepney Green, where they're still on gas-light and horse-drawn carriages. Unbelievable!

[ofdude]

OF product managers, I use omni focus for work extensively. love the tool, has everything i would want in a personal task manager. The only ONE thing that is missing is support for multiple tags.

I am a product manager myself and have to track tasks based on multiple axes: customers, engineering release, testing schedule, priority.

I have been using contexts for tagging, but need at least 2 -3 more axes.
I am open to other suggestions that are implementable.

Fellow product manager :)

[GediWorrier]

I am a recent adopter of OF, and so far happy with it. However, I have just dabbled with Things. Things is nice, but it has crappy links with other apps. But it does have the one thing that I wish OF had: TAGS!

I have read the discussions—OF uses contexts instead of tags. But tags can be used in another way. My projects have to be nested within multi-level folders, and it gets rather tiresome. Much easier to have projects within simple folder structures, and have the added details indicated by tags.

Please :)

The Gedi Worrier

[DrJJWMac]

Originally Posted by GediWorrier

... I have just dabbled with Things ... it does have the one thing that I wish OF had: TAGS! ...

Plenty of folks have asked and continue to ask for this feature. Search here hard enough and you will find that tags were mentioned some time back as possible meta-content to be added in a future version of OF.

Having used Things some time ago, I can only say that tagging (and multiple tagging) was nice to a point. It was however eventually just a distraction to getting my work done. There are only so many times that you can search for actions that are Today as Errands + Grocery Store or some other combination of multiple tags until you realize that you may as well just have a simple Grocery Store context. In addition, Things never did (at that time) and probably still does not allow ...

* complex boolean searches on tags
* REGEX pattern searches on tags

What good is having multiple tags to help you work when you cannot search for Errands that are .NOT.Work or an equivalent? What good is having multiple tags to help you compile a future work report when you cannot search for actions that are ((wait* .AND. colleagues) .NOT. phone)?

So, while I am not against having tags, I think their best place is as meta-content (not primary content) on a task, group, or project. In addition, they should be put in place only along with the requisite tools that make them really worthwhile having (see above).

In the meantime, other improvements to OF would be far more useful for me.

--
JJW

Originally Posted by GediWorrier

… the one thing that I wish OF had: TAGS

Each of these apps has a data model which emerges from (and best suits) a particular way of thinking about what is to be done.

I happen to like the nested structure of OF's model, and the fact that its applescript library and sqlite cache make it possible to bypass any weaknesses in its GUI support for search and reporting, and also provide a good platform for integration with other apps (mainly DEVONthink in my case).

If tags are really an end in themselves, you could look at Taskwarrior (now preferred by Ethan Schoonover, whose Kinkless scripts for OO3 fed into the early history of OmniFocus).

You may find, however, that its model suits you less in other ways – no folders or sub-tasks, for example (though it does have projects and dependencies and priorities), and generally more suited to a command-line work-flow than to any preference for pointing and clicking.

[GediWorrier]

Tags aren't the end, just the means. Its really not that big a philosophical stretch. No reason why you can't allow tags (even better, tags that can be nested a la the folders and contexts, and searched against). It's not a replacement for folders, or contexts. Just adds a lot more utility.

And, btw, after shelling out for the Mac client, and the iPad and iPhone OF apps, you'll forgive me if I don't wander off to some other app just yet. OF will do for a little while yet.

The GediWorrier