[delenca]

+1 on Omnifocus on Android (Droid).

The decision on developing Omnifocus for Android seems like a no-brainer to me. You just have to look at the future - there's huge potential for growth in the Android field and if Omnifocus puts a stake on the ground they'll grab the first costumers. Unlike Things I suspect Omni actually has the resources to simultaneously develop on Mac, Iphone and Android without spreading itself too thin. It's really a business decision - if they think there's a likely return on investment from developing an app for android, then they should do it. Given the fact that an app like Omnifocus would be of daily, critical use to most people, almost everybody would be willing to pay $$ for it (unlike gag/gimmick apps that only succeed by being free).

In the meantime, I am trying out a GTD solution using Evernote. I am finding that it can actually accomplish what a lot of us seek - a synchronized tool that you can run on Mac, Android, IPhone, PC, etc, etc...
Here's one way to implement GTD on Evernote: GTD on evernote.
Even though the app is not built strictly around GTD idea, this implementation is actually working pretty well for me. In the absence of any competition from Omnifocus and Things, Evernote is just going to grab the market.

[JKT]

Originally Posted by HappyDude

Did someone mention here on the thread Things is coming out for Android? This may be enough to make me switch just cause of syncing, though I do enjoy OF and have someday/maybes on it that have start dates in 2011.

If it is as awful as the iPhone version of Things, I wouldn't get your hopes up. I also wouldn't expect it to appear soon, as Cultured Code have been promising recurring tasks in the iPhone app for over a year and a quarter now and they still haven't implemented them. Look elsewhere first as it was a severely disappointing £6 spent.

[CatOne]

Development for Android isn't really a "non brainer" given the Omni Group has COCOA development expertise and knows COCOA and COCOA TOUCH and Android has nothing of the sort.

Coupled with the fact that they have announced they are going full speed ahead on porting lots of apps to the iPad which is COCOA... I really think the "no brainer" comment is a bit off the mark.

A move away from the iPhone or the iPod Touch is probably a move away from OmniFocus... so it's your choice.

[ringods]

Originally Posted by CatOne

Development for Android isn't really a "non brainer" given the Omni Group has COCOA development expertise and knows COCOA and COCOA TOUCH and Android has nothing of the sort.

Look at the available (Snow) Leopard features! My only request for OmniFocus is that they open up access to our *own* data: Sync Services.

Once we have that, someone else can write a client that can interface with an Android/<other device here> to pull the OmniFocus entries to anything we want with 2-way sync...

Ringo

[btlzu2]

Having been an iPhone user for 3 months and going bleeding INSANE over AT&T's awful network, I would love and pay mucho dinero for an Android version of my beloved OmniFocus.

Love the iPhone, Hate the network.

Android is a great little OS and it's on the best network in the U.S. so that trumps all.
:cool:

[dfjdejulio]

Your best bet for getting this functionality right now is to turn on the OmniFocus/iCal sync locally, and then sync iCal tasks out to other systems.

In theory, if you sync from OmniFocus out to an iCal calendar that's backed by a CalDAV store, you should be able to access those todo items via other mechanisms. You can test this theory by trying to access the same CalDAV calendar via Mozilla Sunbird. And then you should be able to mark the task as done in any CalDAV client, and that should flow all the way back into OmniFocus the next time you do an iCal sync.

Now, from what I've read, Google's CalDAV service simply doesn't support todo items. At all. That's a shortcoming of their service, and is up to Google to fix. To interoperate with Google's own "tasks/todo" mechanism, you have to code to custom task-only Google APIs instead of open, interoperable standards such as CalDAV (which they do support, but only for events). I suggest submitting a feature request to Google, asking them to take care of this problem. Once they have, syncing from OmniFocus through to whatever Google device/interface you want ought to be pretty simple.

But asking other developers that already have a pathway for syncing with CalDAV work around shortcomings in one vendor's incomplete CalDAV implementation, rather than asking that vendor to fix their broken implementation, is arguably not the most reasonable approach available.

[btlzu2]

Originally Posted by dfjdejulio

But asking other developers that already have a pathway for syncing with CalDAV work around shortcomings in one vendor's incomplete CalDAV implementation, rather than asking that vendor to fix their broken implementation, is arguably not the most reasonable approach available.

Thanks a lot for the recommendation dfjdejulio. I think my main issue is that it would be lovely to have the OmniFocus client on Android. Not sure if you're replying to someone else on the thread, but to speak for myself, I agree with you that specific request would be unreasonable.

However, having OmniFocus as a client on Android to a burgeoning user base doesn't seem to me to be a bad idea or unreasonable. Even if it didn't sync with anything at this time.

It would be interesting to see if a library could be written which would sync with MobileMe from Apple. That might be useful for this. Hmmm...sounds like a potential fun project for me. :)

Rob

[dfjdejulio]

Originally Posted by btlzu2

However, having OmniFocus as a client on Android to a burgeoning user base doesn't seem to me to be a bad idea or unreasonable.

The problem of course is that people don't quite grasp the degree to which Android and iPhone are fundamentally incompatible programming environments. You can't you the same language across them... and you can't even really use the same application architecture across them.

To some extent, it might be like pointing at an enterprise web application written with J2EE and all sorts of deep frameworks and stuff, and saying "well, it would be nifty to have a version written in FORTRAN that runs on an EBCDIC-based mainframe". You wouldn't be able to "salvage" much beyond requirements and specifications and models, it's more like a re-write from scratch than a port. (Even to the point of not being able to salvage data formats, if your data model was persisted by a tool that's on one platform and not the other. Like, say, Hibernate in the J2EE case, or Core Data in the iPhone case.)

[whpalmer4]

...and if you're going to go to all that work of porting OmniFocus to a completely different platform, you might as well spend the effort catering to the largest pool of potential customers, which would be those poor saps stuck using Windows! Or build a web app that anyone with a reasonable browser can use.

[ringods]

Much faster and more in line with the platforms targeted by OmniGroup (Mac, iPhone) is to leverage (Snow) Leopard's Sync Services. Please don't answer that OmniFocus already does this. It only maps *some* of the data to Apple's predefined to-do entries that show up in iCal. What I mean is that OmniGroup should just publish a full-fledged Sync Services schema for every data type that exists: Projects, Contexts, groups, tasks and add all the attributes on there like On-Hold, Sequential, Parallel, Start & Due dates etc...

If that is offered, other parties can take over from there to build any integration needed. I already started a discussion some time ago.

Ringo