[Brian]

Originally Posted by harringg

I did notice Start events don't alert on the phone like they do on the desktop. Due dates only will alert on the phone? Correct?

Glad I could help! You're correct, but I believe that we have a feature request open on Start notifications; if you email the support ninjas we can attach you to the request. (Ones with more customer interest tend to get assigned higher priority.)

[ken.w]

harringg, the one thing that might not work as you expect from this is that the icon will not update with a badge unless you manually open the OF app. I was expecting it too, like lots of other apps do.

[jonnablaze]

Originally Posted by ken.w

harringg, the one thing that might not work as you expect from this is that the icon will not update with a badge unless you manually open the OF app. I was expecting it too, like lots of other apps do.

Yeah, why doesn't it do this? This is one of my main issues with OF. If the badge notification would update itself I would know something was due just with a glance on my homescreen. Now I have to manually open the app to see if something is due.

[Christian]

In my understanding the icon badge can be updated by some apps that get info pushed from a server. For example, if a news app gets some breaking news pushed from their home server. If you do not have any push then you get no update of the badge unless you open the app. Way around that would be to have a sync server automatically push a notification to OF that a certain item became due. OF in turn would then update the icon badge. That would likely mean, though, that the server would have to constantly analyse all tasks from all users stored on the server in order to find out when something is due. I guess that would be a tough technical challenge.

[jonnablaze]

I'm not sure this is correct. I'm pretty certain that local notifications (introduced in iOS4) let applications send notifications when they're not running, without the need for a server. This should also work for the icon badge as I've seen other apps do this.

[Christian]

If this is correct then it should be possible to implement automatically updated badges kind of using the same technology that lets an app send notifications...

[SFF]

Originally Posted by jonnablaze

I'm pretty certain that local notifications (introduced in iOS4) let applications send notifications when they're not running, without the need for a server. This should also work for the icon badge as I've seen other apps do this.

Yes, this is correct. I am a former user of AwesomeNote, which had this functionality. If you had a task due today, AwesomeNote would update the icon badge without the user having to open the app. I'm pretty sure this came about in iOS4.

Hopefully OF will be able to implement this as well.

[Brian]

Sorry for the confusion - based on the info I'm seeing when I google Awesome Note, it does use the Push Notification system for those badge updates. I don't believe it's possible to do that using only local notifications, though I would love to be proved wrong about that. :-)

[ken.w]

I believe Due is an example of an app that uses local notifications and puts the badge on without having to open the app.

[Brian]

Five bucks isn't much to pay for good software, so I went ahead and bought Due to check this out. Added a reminder and the app had a "1" badge immediately when I quit it.

Is there something I can do to get the badge to only appear once the deadline has passed?