Hopefully one day we will get this feature like google calendar. So glad that at least got the repeating day of the week action before OmniFocus 2 was released, nice to have it in both apps. I have sent in my email on average about once a year for this feature for the last 5 or so years.
2 Likes
I promise that this is really not intended to sound sarcastic (I’m a nice chap, really): since this obviously isn’t straightforward, would it be an interesting exercise for forum members to collaborate until we’d got the algorithm/pseudocode to do this in some sort of shape?
I suspect it may have to do with a kind of ‘Date of Easter’ conundrum whereby a cut off date after which the rules became unmanageable… the whether or not 2100 is a Leap Year, for example, frustrates linear logic.
I’m using a wonderful piece of financial management software nowadays which seems to have given up and made a decision to pick the year 4000 as its greater limit in date filters, rather than try to model infinity. It’s not elegant but it works perfectly.
Other than that - and this would be oh so useful - isn’t it really a mass of Case… statements respecting the Modulus of the way in which any one day in the week falls with respect to the start and end dates of the month in question?
Thanks, OmniGroup!
I don’t think it’s the algorithm that’s holding things up. They said earlier that it was something in the format of the database and if they changed it, it would leave earlier versions out.
Additionally, this has been solved by other programs as well. Todoist (which I’m currently evaluating) for example lets you type “every 3rd tue”, “every other monday”, “every last fri” etc. in the date field and it works.
I’m hopeful that omni will get natural language parsing soon as well. Again, Todoist allows just hitting the quick entry and typing, “Buy beer for poker night every 3rd tue @shopping #home_chores” and it parses that out and adds a repeating task called “Buy beer for poker night” that repeats the 3rd tues of every month, assigns it a context of shopping, and adds it to the home_chores project. You can enter it in any order as well (i.e., “every 3rd tue buy beer…”)
I’ve been an omnifocus user for years, but there’s been a lot of progress in other apps - I hope they catch up soon! Multiple contexts per task, email/sms/push reminders separate from due dates, Filters (Perspectives) based on a search query language (example: “p:home shopping & !(@target | @cvs) & 7days”), available on all platforms & web access, group collaboration (assign tasks to others in your team), etc.
Just so this isn’t all “Todoist” - Todoist doesn’t have “defer dates” which is huge for me - don’t want my lists cluttered with stuff I can’t do yet. And omnifocus just “looks better” which is a big deal for an app you’re using to drive your whole life.
2 Likes
Thanks, Steve - I stand corrected.
Maybe - since, I agree, this would be so useful (2Do, the app from which I switched to OF, can do it as well) - someone at Omni could explain how the schema of OF’s database is getting in the way?
OF is far and away the best, though, IMHO :-)
Mark, I agree… I love the way OF is structured and I want to use it (and have been since 2013 or so). But when you see some of the stuff that’s in the competition, there are some critical areas that (IMHO) should be addressed.
Also, I use OmniGraffle Pro and Omniplan Pro… I’m a big fan of these guys!
2 Likes
Please, I would love to hear this as well.
There are some things that were extremely helpful from OmniFocus 1 on the mac that are still missing from 2 like sort by columns and save perspective as and having the current perspective you are in show up as checked among other things but I’ll stick more to this repeating date thing. I would love to hear more from someone at OmniGroup why this is taking so darn long to implement.
All the rational around just keeping one perspective and no tags also seems a bit bizzar to me as well, I don’t really need overlapping contexts or tags but why not give the people the tags. This seems to be a constant and steady request brought up by hundreds of people. Again I am perfectly fine without, I often wish development wasn’t so slow and so many resources given to all the other apps because OmniFocus is all I use. I might one day use OmniPlan if there were OmniFocus integration but that is also still missing but I digress.
1 Like
I just posted our roadmap for 2017, which includes this feature:
8 Likes
This is wonderful Ken, I am super excited about those updates! Thank you for the post.
1 Like
Any hint as to when in 2017 this feature will rolled out?
2 Likes
Finally!
so now sometime in 2017 we will finally get a feature that Palm OS had back in 1997!
I really have no idea why it’s so hard since the problem was originally solved decades ago, even before the Palm system.
2 Likes
I have just emailed through a request to omnifocus@omnigroup.com and asked for an ETA of when this feature will be rolled out. Hope to hear back soon.
1 Like
I’m afraid our support team can only point you back at my roadmap. I can share a bit more, but please bear in mind (as always) that our plans can and do change as circumstances change. (WWDC17 is right around the corner!)
So, with that caveat in mind: we’ve already finished the first item on that roadmap (faster syncing of databases with large attachments). Another long-requested feature (the ability to see the Inbox when viewing Projects on Mac) is expected very soon (in v2.10), as are free downloads (with trials) for the App Store on Mac and iOS. Many of the remaining items (multiple tags, flexible repeats, and multi-pane batch editing on iOS) involve related UI work that is likely to go into TestFlight in the second half of the year and to ship near to the end of the year.
4 Likes
@kcase, thanks for sharing the preliminary plans – looking forward to the long awaited features! Will flexible repeats also mean flexible reviews?
Not necessarily, I’m afraid: that’s a separate feature. I’ll make sure our team knows you’d like that too.
1 Like
Ah, that’s a pity. It would be equally useful to have more flexible dates in the review feature. It’s very limiting for example not to be able to set reviews to the first or last day of the week or month. Thanks for informing the team.
5 Likes
This feature will be coming one quarter later than originally planned. Sorry for the delay!
1 Like
Seeing that this feature won’t be out until the beginning of next year. Quick question, I’m curious if the database works like this? I just set up a task to give my dogs their monthly heartworm medicine on the 1Jan. If I have the task repeat every 1 month will it know that it will be 1Jan, 1Feb, 1Mar, etc or is one month in the repeat just every 30 days which would cause this system to screw up after February?
If you tell it to start on the first and repeat every month, it will repeat on the first of every month.
(There’s a separate repeat setting for repeating every 30 days: that one would land on different days of the month.)
