[santra]

The simple story: I reorder tasks on iPhone; I sync; I open desktop OF, it syncs, but the re-ordering is lost; I reopen OF on iPhone, and the subsequent sync erases the re-ordering and pulls down the incorrect ordering from MobileMe.

Detail:

Does reordering on the iPhone not work?

I'm using the latest iPhone release (1.0.2); my desktop version is OmniFocus 1.1 sneakypeek (v77.9.0.103547).

1. I'm on my iPhone OF. I make some changes, check some things off, rearrange the order in a project. I sync--twice.

2. I open OF on my Mac. It asks me if it's OK to reopen the database so it can sync. I say OK.

3. The contents of the current project I'm working in look OK, but the order is wrong. Apparently the re-ordering I did on the iPhone did not copy to MobileMe.

4. I go back to my iPhone and open OF. It auto-syncs. The order is now re-arranged to match my desktop OF (and is wrong).

So do I gather from the above that whatever reordering of tasks you do in a project on the iPhone will get lost?

[santra]

And in addition to the above, the checking off of tasks on the iphone this morning during commute was overwritten by the desktop OF's values.

[santra]

OK, I guess this is my bad: I made some changes last night on my desktop OF, probably forgot to sync desktop OF to the cloud, but DEFINITELY forgot to sync iPhone OF with the cloud before I started working with iPhone OF in the subway this morning during commute--and I think that's what screwed it up for me.

I SO need a better process for this whole thing. It would be great if OF iPhone AND desktop OF both synced on Open and Exit, but I'm not sure if that's been implemented by OmniGroup yet. A good wish list item, I guess; but in the meantime, I HAVE to get more disciplined.

Anyway, I just ran a test, and the syncing seems to be working OK, even the ordering.

All I know is, if that dreaded message shows up on the desktop--"OF needs to reopen the database, blah blah," or whatever it is--that usually means: Trouble. In. River. City's. OmniFocus. Subdivision.

[Lizard]

Sync on exit is hard (not possible?) on the iPhone, because the iPhone can just kill OmniFocus if it's too slow to quit when you push the home button.

So we're looking at other ways to solve the problem.

But yes, there is a problem. If you make changes to the same task on two machines at the same time* then only the change from one of those machines will be kept. And changing the order counts as a change on pretty much every task in the project. (And marking off a repeating action changes the order of the other actions in the project, so it's also pretty troublesome.)

*By "same time" I mean that machine 1 pushes a change to the server and machine 2 doesn't get that change before making its own changes. So it's a lot more common than "same time" suggests.