[bcfshops]

All,

Looking for some direction here. I love and own both Omnifocus, and Omnifocus for iPhone/iPod Touch. But, I have the following dilemma that I'm looking to resolve.

At my work, I have a personal MacBook that I organize most of my work on, but as it is a personal machine, it is not connected to any network. So, I can't sync it with my iPod touch. At home, I have an iMac that is connected to a wireless network. This is the syncing desktop. However, since it is at home, and I find that the mobile version of Omnifocus is better suited to entering and managing small tasks (minimal typing), I find that I'm not using Omnifocus regularly.

Any thoughts on how to make my non-networked Mac at work the syncing Mac, so that I can increase my usage of Omnifocus?

Help greatly appreciated,
Brandon

[whpalmer4]

You don't need to keep your work and your non-work tasks in separate databases, do you? Some people want to keep their personal stuff off any work-related machine, but it sounds like you don't have that constraint here, and I'll answer with that assumption.

If you can't get the MacBook at the office on the net somehow (which would probably be the smoothest solution), there's a somewhat less convenient approach you could use. You'll need to be a real stickler for detail to avoid losing changes. You'll set up OF on your machine at home, sync with Bonjour to your iPod. When you go to the office in the morning, you'll sync iPod and iMac to make sure they have identical copies of all your data. When you get to the office, you'll set up a computer-to-computer network with the Wifi card in your MacBook, connect to it with the iPod, and sync the iPod. You'll get a warning that the databases don't match, and you'll tell the iPod to use its local database, which will copy your data to the MacBook. You can make changes on either MacBook or iPod all day long, but before you go home, you need to get them synced together, because you will be using the iPod as the conduit to get those changes back home. When you get home, you sync the iPod, and again specify that its local copy is the one to use, which will install the new database on the iMac. At this point, you can make changes on either iPod or iMac, but before you go to the office again, you need to make sure they are synced together. Each time you take the iPod to the other location, you'll be throwing away the previous database on the Mac, replacing it with the one on the iPod, so the iPod needs to get any changes made in either location before going to the other. I trust you can see that forgetting to do the sync before leaving could result in a lot of wasted effort.

I don't know if the automatic database compaction routines would function well in this scenario. If not, you might have to do a manual compaction now and then. It's not difficult, and Omni provides the commands to do it, but it is one more thing that you'd have to keep tabs on.

[pault6]

An interesting problem. Have you tried creating a wireless network on the at work MacBook and syncing the iPod Touch using the Bonjour syncing method?

Paul

[pault6]

Sorry Brandon, the above answer is much better, I guess we were typing at the same time.

Paul

[whpalmer4]

That's what would need to be done in the scenario I outlined. The problem is that the sync code as implemented isn't really designed for situations where two or more of the clients can't write the same sync database location. If the iPod/iPhone could be the server+client (like the Mac), instead of just a client, then the shenanigans I described wouldn't be necessary.

[bcfshops]

whpalmer4 - MANY THANKS

You solved my problem. I didn't know about bonjour syncing directly from the laptop to the ipod. I had never setup a computer to computer network. That's all I need, as the home computer only entered the mix because I thought I needed a standard wifi network to sync. So, I'll now remove the home computer from the mix and just sync with laptop which was my original thought anyway.

Thank you very much for directing me to this solution.

All the best,
Brandon