[albyrne]

Hi folks, I'm in the groove here today - slamming actions into my system via the quick entry box at a great rate. What's slowing me down, however, is entering a start or due TIME. I can quickly use shortcuts like '1d' or '2w' to enter the required date, but I can't figure out a way to enter a time on that date without having to click in the appropriate field. For example, what I was trying to do just now was to enter an action with a start time of 0645 tomorrow.

Any thoughts? Am I missing something?

OK - just answered my own question - both the Quick Entry box and the application itself only recognises typed time entries in 12h time format, and only typed times on the hour. I just tried '1d 6a', and '2w 6p' and both worked correctly, giving me the expected result (with the entered time displayed in accordance with Mac's system preferences - 24h time format). Entries such as '2d 06' or '3w 19' did not, however, give correct results.

Am I out of luck with wanting to quickly enter times in the format indicated by my Mac's preferences? And, secondly, how do I enter a time that is not on the hour?

al

OF v1.9
Mac OS X v10.6.7

[whpalmer4]

Did you try hh.mm [a|p]?

[albyrne]

Originally Posted by whpalmer4

Did you try hh.mm [a|p]?

Sure did. Entries in the hh.mm [a|p] format work OK. For example: 1d 6.45a gives exactly the result expected. But entry of 2d 19.30 does NOT produce the required result.

My point remains: Omnifocus is not respecting my system preferences. System preferences are set to 24h time format, but, OF is requiring me to make entries using an alternative format.

Bug. I'll submit to the Ninjas.

[whpalmer4]

Sorry, I could have made it clearer that my answer was only intended to address the question of how to enter a time that was not on the hour with only the keyboard.

This is free-form parsing, not handled by a system facility by my understanding, so while it isn't what you want, it arguably isn't a bug if it is working as intended. I don't recall ever seeing an example in any documentation suggesting 24hr format is supported. In any case, probably your best bet for the near future is to use my suggestion, as I doubt there are enough requests for enhancement to get it to the top of the heap before 2.0 comes out, and at the moment, you can't even hope to see it in a sneaky peek build, as they've apparently gone on hiatus. Whether a bug or unwelcome design decision, the right approach is what you've done...

[Ken Case]

Originally Posted by albyrne

2d 19.30 does NOT produce the required result.

What does work is "2d 19:30". 24-hour time is supported (that's my preference as well), but I'm afraid OmniFocus looking for the colon to indicate that it's a time rather than a period. (Periods are ambiguous because they're often used to separate day/month/year.)

I do think it would be reasonable to try to make OmniFocus smarter about this, especially if your preferred time display format is "19.30" (and you've already included "2d" as your date component as in this case). The bug, then, is that OmniFocus doesn't support alternate time separators very well for 24-hour time entry.

[whpalmer4]

Well, I'm not sure if I failed to try the most obvious format, or failed to notice I hadn't typed it correctly. I see that my memory appears to be failing, too — there is an example of hh:mm in 24 hour format in the help. Fairly priced at "free", it would appear :-)