[whpalmer4]

Why did you choose to ignore the message in the first place?

[Ken Case]

Originally Posted by mtnygard

The annoying frequency of this nag caused me to disregard it, which in turn caused me to overlook an actual problem. Classic case of the "boy who cried wolf."

I've been thinking about how to improve that dialog to make it more relevant, perhaps saying something like this:

To keep syncing performance optimal, Omni recommends that you keep no more than 150 transactions in your sync history. Because you haven't synced "oenone" in over a month, your sync history is currently using 2,500 more transactions than would otherwise be necessary.

You can solve this by syncing "oenone" or by unregistering it. If you choose to unregister it, it will automatically resynchronize the next time you use it—but any local changes which haven't already been synchronized will be lost.

And then, of course, not bothering you with this alert at all unless your sync history really was over 150 transactions.

Would that help?

[jonmarsh]

Originally Posted by Ken Case

Would that help?

It would certainly help me!

This dialog box seriously annoys me. I use OmniFocus from 4 different devices depending on which one is closest at the time. I love it that I can use OmniFocus like this.

However I don't make that many edits and I only use 1 or 2 of the devices regularly. When I click ignore the sync only takes a few seconds. Therefore I spend a few seconds clicking away this dialog box every day or 30 seconds deleting the currently unused registration just to save my Macs from doing 0.1s of extra work. That's a bad piece of design. If it must nag, it should do so only when there is a real problem and I should not have to trundle off to the preferences screen in order to solve the problem (i.e. add the option to un-register the client to the nag dialog box).

I look forward to the new and improved sync in forthcoming versions but in the meantime I shall apply the settings in this post so that I get nagged less frequently.

Jon.

[iNik]

I just added this option to the "Secrets" database and preference pane so that folks can avoid "defaults" if they want to.

Also, one year in seconds is 31540000 -- probably a useful amount to just keep the monkey off your back. (Personally, I have one computer set to the normal setting, and the others bug me annually now)

[Kevin R]

Sorry, but the workarounds to reduce the aggravation level of the complaints aren't good enough. OmniFocus has absolutely no business complaining in the first place, at least not with modal dialog boxes.

(The suggestions to only nag at start-up would not be an improvement. So many times I start up OmniFocus precisely because I've remembered a task that I need to type in before I forget. But wait, there's that annoying box again. My hands need to leave the keyboard, fumble for the mouse, dismiss the dialog box, go back to -- Congratulations, you've made me forget what I was going to type. So much for getting all my stuff out of my mind and into a trusted system.)

Yeah, I get it. It's a good idea to sync all my devices regularly for technical reasons. But can you honestly tell me that keeping all my devices in sync is so vastly more important than every single other thing I have to do in my life that it alone should get to nag me completely outside my normal task-management workflow?

Is it so vastly more important that it alone should get to force itself into my consciousness at seemingly random times rather than when I'm ready to choose my next task (and my only way of even slightly modifying the times isn't with the OF features I use for everything else, but to fiddle with secret options using arcana of the operating system, repeating on every device I own)?

Is it so vastly more important that it alone should get to yank my attention away from whatever other application I'm using on my computer -- not only ignoring context, but when I'm guaranteed to be in exactly the wrong context to do anything about it?

If you're so firmly convinced that regular syncing is important, have OF slip reminders into my inbox so that I can choose to deal with them, or not, the same way I do all my other tasks. (And provide a preference to turn that behavior off.)

Nagging users over minor technical issues with modal dialog boxes isn't just bad interface design and incredibly rude, it fundamentally violates the GTD philosophy that OF is allegedly made to support.

[whpalmer4]

Originally Posted by Kevin R

Nagging users over minor technical issues with modal dialog boxes isn't just bad interface design and incredibly rude, it fundamentally violates the GTD philosophy that OF is allegedly made to support.

Where is it that David Allen & Co. describe proper user interface design for GTD? I agree that modal dialogs can be annoying (my pet peeve is the sync client display blocking the application from quitting, when I'm the one who requested the display) but "fundamentally violates the GTD philosophy"?

[joseph.gruber]

How about an option when the message first comes up that says something to the effect of. Cancel and don't remind me again until (xxxx -- drop down).

I'm glad I found this thread because this alert is very annoying to me since I have the iPhone app that I don't frequently use.

[ctawn]

can we change it to a million years?

like the first poster, i don't care if my laptop that i rarely use hasn't been synced. and i don't care either about the iphone. until the rare occasion i want to use either. after reading this thread i understand the issues better, so thanks. but still i would prefer never ever to get that annoying warning and wait longer to sync when i do use those other devices. life is stressful. too much to keep in sync. on the laptop if there could be a daemon running that would solve it. on the iphone not so sure. the iphone sync situation generally sucks as you have to sync every app individually. palm was much better with conduits.

[whpalmer4]

ctawn, did you bother to read Ken's posts where he described how to set the behavior? It's all there. Just type in any 11 or 12 digit number that strikes your fancy and it won't bother you for years (except for your database getting larger and slower).

If you have clients you rarely run and don't care if it takes a bit longer for them to sync when they start, use the show clients display in the sync preferences on a machine you do use frequently and simply delete those rarely used clients. The client(s) you do use regularly will perform better, and the ones you don't use regularly will perform no worse.

[ctawn]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

ctawn, did you bother to read Ken's posts where he described how to set the behavior? It's all there. Just type in any 11 or 12 digit number that strikes your fancy and it won't bother you for years (except for your database getting larger and slower).

If you have clients you rarely run and don't care if it takes a bit longer for them to sync when they start, use the show clients display in the sync preferences on a machine you do use frequently and simply delete those rarely used clients. The client(s) you do use regularly will perform better, and the ones you don't use regularly will perform no worse.

yes, i read it, and changed one end to whatever defaults he set. sorry didn't feel like calculating seconds that much. now the other end(s) -- as one poster said, guaranteed to not be the right context to do that ;-) i like the idea of putting the reminder as a task rather than a modal dialog.

the option to delete and restore clients all the time is also a time suck. just ironic for an app that's supposed to help manage my time is all.

so what happened, a year ago there was a post about a new algorythm for sync that would eliminate this need. and especially with < 150 transactions. i would say i don't use OF enough to approach that in an average month. so that would be groovy.