Comments on: OmniFocus GTD app goes into public beta

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 03:04:00 +0000

Hey Tim, Thanks. It’s nice to be resurfacing a bit now that OmniFocus is getting closer to done. We’ll keep you posted on progress on this front… :)

By: Tim Gaden

Tim Gaden — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 03:01:51 +0000

Mr Schoonover! Great to hear from you. The ability to save particular contexts in a calendar connected to a Mail account would be a great bonus. Glad to hear that something is on the cards.

By: Ethan

Ethan — Wed, 21 Nov 2007 02:52:00 +0000

For what it’s worth, we at Omni are all very interested in getting OmniFocus content on the iPhone (The Omni Group is pretty much 99% iPhone users, so we have a dog in this fight). Rest well assured that as soon as we have options for doing this in a way that allows reasonable functionality, we’ll be on it.

-Ethan

By: Tim Gaden

Tim Gaden — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 21:07:02 +0000

Phil, you’ve posted the post that I was going to post! Thanks.

You’re right it is not a perfect system by any means. But until MailTags gets its to-dos back - hopefully integrated with Leopard Mail’s to-do system, it’s the best solution that I know of.

What will you use instead?

By: Phil

Phil — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 20:59:35 +0000

I dunno, I’m finding that OF–>iPhone–>OF is too fiddly to be very practical.

1) Create a task in OF with context of @iPhone

2) Sync OF to iCal (works very nicely)

3) Move task from @iPhone calendar On My Mac to IMAP calendar (this gets the task into Mail and into the Apple Mail To-Dos folder in the Mail application on the iPhone.

But here it breaks down. There’s no way to “check off” the task. You can

a.) Mark it Unread (sometimes it doesn’t stay unread)
b.) Delete it
c.) Move it to a Done folder that you’ve set up in your IMAP account.

Whichever step you choose, you have to remember to go back and tick the item off in OmniFocus. There’s no upstream sync from iPhone–>Mail–>iCal–>Omnifocus that I can see.

By: svante

svante — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:11:29 +0000

An interesting observation: if I open a Todo in my webmail, I can read all the information - notes, due date, contacts, priorities, calendar etc…

I hope someone finds out how to parse this information - hell, even a native app in IPhone could do this?!

By: svante

svante — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 10:06:45 +0000

I actually got it working at last. Here’s how I did it. I couldn’t by any way drag or create a subfolder to the ToDos in Mail (the same manner as Notes or actually any IMAP subfolder). What I did was I opened the Mail folder in Finder at /User/me/Library/Mail/Mailboxes/ and duplicated the Notes.mbox folder that I could see was syncing to my IMAP account. I renamed it Todos.mbox and removed all messages. Now in Mail, under the Todo icon, there was a subfolder with the same name as my IMAP account! After syncing with my iPhone I could see the longed Apple Mail Todo” Folder.

My ToDos looks pretty shitty on the iPhone though, maybe because of my ugly workaround, because the todo is in the subject field and above is a bold (No Sender) field where the sender is in all mails.

Hopefully someone will make sure this works better, and is easier to set up, and inshallah, maybe we can even start using them as todos on the iPhone, yeah, maybe even editing would be possible one beautiful day. This is still a mystery to me, how could Apple leave this feature out????

By: Tim Gaden

Tim Gaden — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 22:35:45 +0000

svante: I’m flying around the country at the moment on an academic junket. When I get back I’ll knock something out.

By: svante

svante — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 21:04:44 +0000

Hi Tim and alex, Ive been trying all day to create an “Apple mail todo calendar” thing on my imap account, but no success. Can you elaborate on how to make them belong to a certain imap account instead of This Computer?

By: Alex

Alex — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 06:18:19 +0000

Regarding this “todo on my iPhone”.
I created several todos in Leopard’s Mail.app. Then I connected my iPhone and RESYNCED my mail account settings. Voila - the folder “apple mail todo” is now visible on the iPhone and shows all todos.
I have no idea about how to edit this or enter a new one. Seems like one-way only….