[Robejazz]

Hello Omni,

I noticed that some of the new GTD/ToDo Apps are able to sync with the ical calenders associated with the .Mac account. That would be a huge plus for me. Is there anyway to do this? I know and trust Omni's development skills so it makes me wonder if there is a good reason they are NOT doing this and the other companies are (http://www.orionbelt.com/index.php for example)??

Thanks,

Robe

[Brian]

We chose not to do this because we didn't think that folks would want an action that starts on Monday and finishes on Friday to cover up the whole week in iCal.

I didn't see any screenshots on the EasyTask website, but I'd be interested to know how other apps out there handle actions like that. Do they just synch a start event and an end event? Or do they cover up your whole calendar?

[Robejazz]

Originally Posted by Brian

We chose not to do this because we didn't think that folks would want an action that starts on Monday and finishes on Friday to cover up the whole week in iCal.

I didn't see any screenshots on the EasyTask website, but I'd be interested to know how other apps out there handle actions like that. Do they just synch a start event and an end event? Or do they cover up your whole calendar?

It is not a dated item in the events area. What I am saying is that in iCal and Mac Mail there are 3 groups of calenders - Calenders and .Mac and subscriptions. Omni can only sync with the top item, calenders, and not the .Mac ones or subscriptions. When I demoed Easy Task it synced to the .Mac calenders. Am I making sense?? Not sure if I am. But it would be great to have my todos in Omnifocus synced to the .Mac cals???? I dont mean anything with .Mac syncing, by the way. this is all in i cal and mac mail (and therefore on my iphone in the Apple Mail To Do Folder, which is what I really want!!)

Robe

[JKT]

Originally Posted by Brian

We chose not to do this because we didn't think that folks would want an action that starts on Monday and finishes on Friday to cover up the whole week in iCal.

On the contrary, that is precisely what I want to see. The usefulness of OmniFocus to me as a project planner (which is how I use it) is greatly reduced because it can't do this. Along with an inability to add alarms to to-do's in iCal, this is a big limitation in the software.

[Brian]

Originally Posted by Robejazz

Omni can only sync with the top item, calenders, and not the .Mac ones or subscriptions. When I demoed Easy Task it synced to the .Mac calenders.

Aaah, now I see - yes, because OmniFocus 1.x needs to run on both 10.4 and 10.5, we only support synching to local calendars.

Network calendars were added in 10.5; we currently plan to support them in a future version of OmniFocus that requires that version of the OS. (OmniFocus 2.0 at the earliest, in other words.)

[brianogilvie]

Originally Posted by JKT

On the contrary, that is precisely what I want to see. The usefulness of OmniFocus to me as a project planner (which is how I use it) is greatly reduced because it can't do this. Along with an inability to add alarms to to-do's in iCal, this is a big limitation in the software.

I beg to differ. As OF was developed, "start" means "becomes available to do," not "must be started." The duration field is for the estimated time a task will take. I have a lot of actions and projects whose start date is the beginning of a new semester and whose due date is sometime in that semester, or at its end. If they were represented as iCal events, I would have about 150 events on today's calendar. That's the situation that Brian wants to avoid.

I could imagine a tool that represented graphically each of your projects, with start dates and deadlines drawn as line segments across a grid of days or weeks, and "beads" on each segment corresponding to the estimated duration of each part of the project. You could then move the beads back and forth, like an abacus, to balance the critical paths of several different projects and work out a sensible schedule, with a running total at the bottom of each day or week for the total amount of scheduled work. That would be a neat tool, but it would not be OmniFocus.

[Brian]

Originally Posted by JKT

On the contrary, that is precisely what I want to see.

There are definitely some folks that would like to see this, but we don't think the majority of our users would want it, and we have to design with the majority in mind. Keep in mind that we're not in control of the way the data is displayed; iCal is. We export an event with a start date/time and end date/time - it does the rest.

Example: Here's how iCal shows WWDC, which starts on a Monday and ends on Friday:


(I disabled most of my calendars, but left one of my personal ones enabled so you can see how the event interacts with the other ones on the calendar.)

Now, if you have that going on for every multi-day action you sync over from OmniFocus, it's very quickly going to make iCal harder to use. Your events are going to be hidden behind a bunch of anonymous colored bars, with the labels for said bars displayed way up at the top of each day column. Personally, I don't want to have to do that much scrolling.

I'm not saying we're never going to sync actions to the calendar; nor am I promising that we will. I'm just talking about a specific method we considered but ended up rejecting, explaining some of the reasons why we arrived at that conclusion. We're always open to feedback or suggestions, of course.

[JKT]

I'm also not saying that this should be the only option or the default option, just an option. How my iCal calendar looks and works should be down to me - personally, I don't ever use week or day view for my calendars in iCal - only monthly view, so seeing bars spanning multiple days is quite appropriate for the way I view things. However, my main need for this is because my phone does not support to do's very well and because I also need alarms on items so that I can flag them as coming up on my phone.

In addition, iCal does have the ability to create groups of calendars so toggling their view on and off is very easy to do. If I don't want a cluttered view all the time, I could just put all my OmniFocus calendars in one group and switch it on and off when I need to do so, thus preserving my 'user' calendars.

[Brian]

Unfortunately, this isn't particularly useful in month view, either - in that view, iCal creates an entry on the day the event starts, but that's all. There's nothing stretching across multiple days.

We may address the need that you're expressing in a future build; we just won't be doing so in the particular manner I'm describing here.

[JKT]

Not if it is created as an 'all day' event - it will span multiple days.