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Timezone change impacted due dates. Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
Here's a weird one. Flew from Mpls to Las Vegas. Opened up OmniFocus on my iPad, and all my due dates moved up by one day. Things normally due on Sat were now due on Friday. Same on my iPhone. I shut off my automatic time zone setting on my iPad, and set it back to Central time. Problem solved. Anybody else had this issue?
 
I can report to have had exactly the same problem with OmniFocus on the Mac. I do not have an iPad, but this is an issue that apparently plagues OF on both platforms. I am a frequent traveller and hope it will be addressed soon.
 
The dates in OF are stored in GMT, so a task scheduled to start at 12:00 am Friday in New York would show up as starting at 11 pm Thursday in Minneapolis. With all due respect to Einstein, those are the same times. There are a couple of problems here. On the one hand, OF manages tasks not appointments, so when a task starts on Friday, I want it to start on Friday, regardless of what time zone I'm in. On the other hand, if my MacBook is on my desk in Indiana and my iPad and I are at my parent's house in Iowa, I still want all the synchronized tasks to be consistent (e.g., the same tasks are available).

I find the current behavior somewhat annoying, but don't see how to change it without screwing up syncing.
__________________
Cheers,

Curt

Last edited by curt.clifton; 2010-12-30 at 12:39 PM.. Reason: Fixing iPad typos
 
The Workaround I use on the iPad is to leave the the timezone setting the same no matter where I am. Go Settings --> General --> Date & Time and manually set the date and time to your present timezone. This leaves all the O.F. item due dates as you made them
 
As someone who spends several chunks of the year eight time zones away from where he spends the rest of the year, I'd like to see this get tweaked, too.

That said, the majority of our customers spend the majority of their time in a single time zone. All other things being equal, we try to devote our development time to the most frequently requested items; that means the improvements help as many customers as possible.

In other words, please send email to the support ninjas and help this feature request move up that list. :-)
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by curt.clifton View Post
The dates in OF are stored in GMT, so a task scheduled to start at 12:00 am Friday in New York would show up as starting at 11 pm Thursday in Minneapolis. With all due respect to Einstein, those are the same times. There are a couple of problems here. On the one hand, OF manages tasks not appointments, so when a task starts on Friday, I want it to start on Friday, regardless of what time zone I'm in. On the other hand, if my MacBook is on my desk in Indiana and my iPad and I are at my parent's house in Iowa, I still want all the synchronized tasks to be consistent (e.g., the same tasks are available).

I find the current behavior somewhat annoying, but don't see how to change it without screwing up syncing.
I thought to bump this thread as my travel schedule has become more intensive and I see my OmniFocus workflow seriously disrupted as a result of this bug (or feature, as others may call it).

At the very least, I would like to see an option allowing "floating" start and end times, in the manner of iCal ("floating" in this case means that start and end times remain the same regardless of time zone).

The potential problem that Curt brings up—namely that synching would be messed up as different tasks would be deemed "available" in different time zones—can be addressed by synching the entire OmniFocus library to both machines and determining availability "locally," so that each machine would have its own list of available tasks without any inconsistencies creeping in.

Or am I missing something?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by macula View Post
The potential problem that Curt brings up—namely that synching would be messed up as different tasks would be deemed "available" in different time zones—can be addressed by synching the entire OmniFocus library to both machines and determining availability "locally," so that each machine would have its own list of available tasks without any inconsistencies creeping in.
The entire library is already synced to all machines.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by whpalmer4 View Post
The entire library is already synced to all machines.
Actually, I thought so and this is why Curt's post puzzled me somewhat.

Perhaps the venerable Applescript wizard Rob Trew could contribute a script that would adjust the start and end times (and dates, when necessary) according to the current timezone?
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by macula View Post
Perhaps ... Rob Trew could contribute
Venerable but a bit busy, and commuting less than before :-)

Not sure that enough data is stored for this at the moment - the dateModified field might need a twin field on the lines of TimeZoneWhereModified.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by macula View Post
At the very least, I would like to see an option allowing "floating" start and end times, in the manner of iCal ("floating" in this case means that start and end times remain the same regardless of time zone).
Yeah, essentially we'd have to add a per action/project/group "floating" checkbox, which means modifying the database under the hood to store that setting. Once you do that, you need to ensure that everyone updates their app to the versions that know what to do with that setting, and make sure that nothing bad happens when they inevitably sync a device running an older version... It's a small feature on the surface, but under the hood it's a bigger deal for the engineers and QA.

I'll be heading over to the UK again in a few weeks, and this issue will inconvenience me during that time; I feel your pain.

If it helps, looking at the development database, this looks like the kind of thing we'll change someday; it's not a huge group, but there are a number of other folks that want this change too. At the moment, though, there are other things that customers as a whole want more. (And that metric sets aside things like "support iOS 5", which aren't on that list but we can assume would show up really fast if we didn't add them.)

If we lived in a world with infinite engineers, we wouldn't have to prioritize and could just work on everything at once; let's hope that day arrives sometime soon. ;-)
 
 


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