[chinarut]

tim: good point re: notifications on the iPhone.

that said, on the desktop, i have been quite pleased with my Growl notifications - they have been working very well over the last month for me!

[Jd47]

What if you give OF the ability to generate a simple calendar that iCal can subscribe to? Give tasks the option to be alarms and make their due date/time events with alarms?

iCal would do all the heavy lifting and users could keep everything in one place, rather than creating one-off tasks in iCal.

[BonafideBM]

Has Apple indicated if they are going to allow non-Apple apps like OF for iPhone access to the pop-up support used by apps like Text and Calendar?

[JKT]

Something like it for third party apps on the iPhone was meant to arrive last September, but mysteriously it still hasn't. I assume that whatever Apple had in mind didn't work very well once they realised just how many apps would want to use it, so they started over and whatever the new API is going to be, it is not going to arrive for some time (probably).

[BonafideBM]

Originally Posted by JKT

Something like it for third party apps on the iPhone was meant to arrive last September, but mysteriously it still hasn't. I assume that whatever Apple had in mind didn't work very well once they realised just how many apps would want to use it, so they started over and whatever the new API is going to be, it is not going to arrive for some time (probably).

That sounds plausible. A GTD app like OF for iPhone has a genuine call for it as opposed to something like iFart. But - something I just realized - OF for iPhone would have to run in the background full time just like Phone and Mail. Well, I am all for it. Having a popup-alert-plus-vibrate-plus-tone occurring at 4:59 PM will ensure that I pickup the light bulbs at the hardware store on the way home (as opposed to the placid passivity of the little red badge icon with a number in it, which I am too predisposed to ignore, since my home springboard is full of little red badge icons with numbers in them.)

Hear this Omnigroup? I really hope this is where we can take this app, Apple willing, of course.

[CatOne]

Of course, your methodology (ring alerts all day long reminding me of things I should be doing) somewhat flies in the face of GTD.

[vballas]

I really cannot understand why the original apple plan wouldn't work.

Imagine this.
A mainstream notifications queue that runs in the background, indepentently from apps.
Each app can add / remove / change notification either from the web OR from the app when it runs.

If a notification comes of time, then the system just displays it.

Why would that simple logic not work ?

[JKT]

I assume it is because you could theoretically have ([9 x 16] + 4) = 148 apps all sending to the queue in quick succession (and potentially multiple times for each app, e.g. an IM app), thus leading to notification overload and battery drain. In theory that worst case scenario sounds absolutely dire; in practice, I doubt it would be anywhere close to that extreme. However, I suspect that once Apple started testing their initial implementation, they quickly realised that there was the chance that things could get close enough to the extreme that it would be unworkable in real world usage.

I'm just hypothesising so I could be well off the mark. However, what is self-apparent is that what Apple tried just didn't work well enough or we would have had it in the OS by now.

[Ken Case]

Originally Posted by vballas

I really cannot understand why the original apple plan wouldn't work.

Imagine this.
A mainstream notifications queue that runs in the background, indepentently from apps.
Each app can add / remove / change notification either from the web OR from the app when it runs.

If a notification comes of time, then the system just displays it.

Why would that simple logic not work ?

That's exactly the feature request I made to Apple last summer: time-based notifications that work like their proposed server-based notifications, so we can schedule notifications from OmniFocus. I'm still hopeful that it will happen at some point.

[BonafideBM]

Good! Thanks Ken. I am ecstatic to hear that this is a feature you'd like to add. People that wouldn't want to use it wouldn't have to, of course, but it would be a godsend for errand management.