[jcarucci]

I bought the new iPhone app and after using it for about a week, I decided to buy the full blown desktop app. I generally love it, but I sometimes have problems with syncing. Today, I put about 5 new things in my Inbox on the iphone. I made sure I did a sync on the iphone, then I opened Omnifocus on my Powerbook and did a sync there. None of the items made it to the Powerbook. They didn't disappear from the iPhone either. How can this happen? What steps should I take to make sure both copies are the same.

Thanks,
Jason

[qlfwyyd]

I have the same problem. I have a shopping list project, and I sometimes type out a quick list on my Mac and then hit sync before going to the shops. This usually syncs okay to the iPhone, but when I complete items on the iPhone they don't sync to the desktop even when I manually press sync. I'm going to try deleting the iDisk version of the database and try resyncing everything to see if that works, I'll post if it does.

[qlfwyyd]

OK, I've tried deleting the file from my iDisk, deleting the app from my iPhone and reinstalling (and resynching from the desktop). The original database is all synced, but then when I go to type out a new shopping list, hit sync and then open Omnifocus on my iPhone it doesn't load the new shopping list. It's like Omnifocus on the iPhone isn't looking at the server? The loading time when it opens is negligible, I don't think it's loading the new actions on when it starts. Is there any way to force this?

[qlfwyyd]

I think it must be the auto syncing when the iPhone app opens that's the problem. If I manually sync the database from the iPhone app after it's open it appears to sync the changes. I may be under the false impression that the loading screen when the iPhone app opens is contacting the server - but perhaps it doesn't? Can anyone confirm?

I think the problems were occuring when I wasn't syncing changes between the two manually. If I make changes on the iPhone app and then forget to sync before using the desktop app I was creating problems. I think some of these issues must have been resolved with the recent update - because I seem to be getting error messages now when the two databases sync at the same time. But it would be good if the error messages were a bit more user friendly - rather than saying it was restoring from the database, it might be a bit easier to know what's going on if it asked which copy of the database you wanted to go with (ie desktop or iPhone).

Anyway, seems to be working quite well now, so I can't complain too much!

[Andrew]

The "Loading" progress bar when OmniFocus for the iPhone launches is not it contacting the server - it's just it loading the local database.

OmniFocus sometimes will contact the server on launch, but only if it hasn't checked for changes in the past hour. This applies to both the iPhone app and the desktop app. If you're not seeing changes that you think should be there, it may simply be that OmniFocus hasn't grabbed those changes from the sync location yet - try doing a manual sync in that case. (And make sure that OmniFocus has pushed the changes to the sync location from wherever those changes were made. It will automatically push changes a minute or two after you make the change, but if you exit OmniFocus before it has a chance to sync up, those changes won't get pushed until you next launch the app.)

[jcarucci]

I think I've figured out the problem. This afternoon when I got home from work, I was careful to first press the sync button on the Omnifocus on my iPhone to get all the latest items on the MobileMe server. Then I opened Omnifocus on the mac and pressed the sync button. This time everything was perfectly in sync.

I think what was happening before is that I started the Omnifocus on my Mac and on the iPhone at the same time. Does Omnifocus have trouble merging changes from two different devices at the same time?