@wilsonng: I use to grab the device that’s nearest to me to make changes and enter new tasks. I just don’t want to care about sync and how to work around issues. OF is expensive and Omni should take care of this.
If you don’t wanna think about sync you better choose Things ;-)
(pun intended)
That’s exactly what I think, too. They just don’t care.
They had a chance to improve both, OF’s database model and the sync architecture, with the release of OF 2. But they didn’t. They just wrapped a new UI around it and added some long-awaited features and pushed it out the door.
@maxjensen: Yes, Todoist has its own shortcomings. It’s a web app. But I like it. It features many time-saving little things. And I am able to emulate many of the workflows I use in OF, except Forecast and Review.
The collaboration features are also great. You can attach files and location data to any task and you can assign both, due dates and reminders, separately and in natural language (much like in Fantastical). It generates a subscribe-able calendar, too. Another plus is that you can transform a task’s title into a clickable link – I love that!
I think I am giving Todoist a closer look and a longer trying now. Maybe it is holding me back from switching to Things again ;-)
@Thomas: I agree with the attached files and links! In fact that it’s a web app is a benefit to me at work where it’s PC only. So, I can easily run it in Google Chrome. I would prefer using Things through. I think it’s the best designed apps for both Mac and iOS. And if you look at the tweets coming to Cultured Code, it is obvious how well it has been designed. It is rarely about any problems using their apps.
But for me, it’s a little cumbersome using it at work and feeding it tasks through iCloud or my iPhone. So if it hadn’t been because of work, Things would be my favorite choice, by far!
UPDATE: The only annoying with Todoist are the little issues that pops up occasionally. The widget on my iPhone is not very reliable and often empty when I have several tasks that are due. And just now, I couldn’t attach from Dropbox or Google Drive although it was working last week. And it’s not really because any of these things are that important to me. It’s just than I can’t really trust them to be working when I actually need them. So, actually I have gone back to Things again. You never get any unpleasant surprises there. They do not deliver more than they know will work ALL the time.
So good luck whatever you end up using! And let’s hope that OF syncing gets sorted :)
@Thomas,
If you don’t want to set up your own server, there is still the possibility to use one of the existing services (as you certainly already know).
Also located in Germany (very south-west), I had similar performance problems with the OF sync server. Rarely fast, sometimes acceptable, but most of the time simply annoying (my database holds around 1500 objects shared by a Mac and three iOS devices).
Some time ago, I decided to try the GMX WebDav Server (https://webdav.mc.gmx.net/, physical location is Dortmund) which is a free addition to my GMX mail account. Time to setup for all devices: around 10 minutes.
So far I’m really pleased with the result, everything works w/o any problems, sync speed is way better and nearly independent from weekday and/or daytime.
My Mac is 24/7 online, so sending tasks per mail is not a problem, from my point of view that’s the only reason to use OF’s sync server from Europe.
Thomas
Things hasn’t really worked out for me (pun intended)
Dropbox is not an adequate solution. If Dropbox is updating and you make an edit during mid-sync, you introduce the opportunity for corrupted data. Dropbox is suitable for whole file syncing and not for database type transactions.
iCloud sounds promising but it took Apple a few years to get it into its current state as iCloud Drive. Waiting for the dust to settle before relying on iCloud drive.
yes I’m not sure about Dropbox. I don’t know the API and what’s possible or not but my guess is that it should be possible to implement some sort of locking-mechanism even if it’s on a file-basis. I think 2DO uses Dropbox too and I heard less complaints of it not working than about OmniSync…(I agree though that iCloud-Sync is probably the better/more robust option) ;)
If you are having syncing troubles, please make sure you are emailing our support humans about them. In some cases, we may be able to resolve it immediately. Some stuff we know about and are working on. (Revising the file format is a long-term project.) Others, we can’t fix until we get more details from folks.
Glad you noticed! Over the break, we migrated a number of customers from our original Mac mini servers over to much more powerful servers with a lot more I/O capacity.
We only did this migration for customers who were exclusely using the latest versions of our apps, since those versions have logic in place to make those migrations seamless. We’ll be migrating our remaining customers over to the new servers soon, but we plan to send email notices to each of those customers first since the migration won’t be quite as simple (they’ll be prompted to reenter their sync passwords for the new servers the next time they sync each device).
We very much do care, and we’ve been working on improving this both on the back end (improving our server hardware and network) and on the front end.
When we think about sync performance, there are two key metrics:
Load on our sync servers and network performance affect the first metric, and I think our new sync servers have mostly solved this for people who have a good connection to our servers and who have been migrated to the newer servers. If you’re seeing a single sync operation take more than 15 seconds, please let us know so we can investigate why that might be. (In my investigations to date, the most common issues have been that some customers haven’t been migrated to our new server hardware yet. But we’ve also seen some customers stuck behind a slow network link that is out of our control, in which case it would help to set up a server which is closer to them on the network.)
Improved sync duration is great, but that doesn’t help if the app isn’t actually trying to sync frequently enough—i.e., if there’s a lot of latency between when a change is made and when the app syncs. To improve sync latency in OmniFocus 2, we made it so that whenever one device running OmniFocus finishes syncing, it tells other synced devices running OmniFocus on the local network that now would be a good time for them to sync as well. This means that if I have OmniFocus open on my Mac and iPhone and I make and sync a change on one device, I’ll immediately see that change appear on the other device without having to wait for the next sync interval. (However, this only helps when OmniFocus is running. If it’s not running, it can’t receive the notification and doesn’t know that it missed a sync.)
That improvement is great, as far as it goes—but unfortunately, we introduced two problems in OmniFocus 2.4 for iPhone that made sync latency much worse. First, a little background: OmniFocus 2.3 for iPhone would sync automatically when leaving the app, and would also sync automatically when you opened the app if it had been more than an hour since it last synced. But in version 2.4, we accidentally broke both of those automatic syncs, so you could leave the app and your most recent edits would never sync—or you could come back some hours later and it wouldn’t realize that it was time to sync then either. We’ve fixed some of those issues in v2.4.1 and v2.4.2, and one more fix is coming in v2.4.3 that should get us back to where we were in v2.3.
Combined with the server side improvements, the fixes in v2.4.3 should mean that OmniFocus syncing will be better than it ever has been. But that doesn’t mean that we consider syncing to be a solved problem. We’re continuing to work on both sync duration and sync latency: we have some plans for changes to the sync format which will improve our sync duration, and we’ll be working on automatically initiating syncs more frequently to improve our sync latency. Some of these changes will be incompatible with OmniFocus 1, however, so we’ve been giving our customers time to transition from v1 to v2 on all their devices before we make those changes.
Very good to hear things are actively being worked on.
For anyone who needs an improvement right now - SwissDISK are offering free WebDAV space. http://www.swissdisk.com
I just set it up and it improves sync times significantly for me. It comes with all the concerns of a free cloud service, but it might be worth a shot if you are looking for an improvement while this issue is being sorted out at Omni.
I have to admit I remorsefully moved back to OmniFocus last night. I’ve been trying some other GTD apps (again) but nothing comes close to OF’s flexibility and feature set. For me and the way I work there simply is no real alternative out there.
To skip the sync issues I started a WebDAV service on our own web server and it performed pretty well. Because of security reasons I don’t want to have WebDAV services running on that server permanently, but it was good for testing.
@khaberz + @the: Thanks for the hints. I’ll give them a closer look if OF’s sync issues return.
@kcase: Thanks for replying. As mentioned above, I initially had a very good sync experience but it turned bad soon afterwards – for reasons I am unable to reproduce. No changes on my side and we have big pipes (50 Mbit/s down and 10 MBit/s upstream local and 42/8 on mobile).
Last night I tried OmniSync again and it was pretty good. Clients are syncing much more frequently now. I’d really like to avoid 3rd party WebDAV services and keep using OmniSync / OmniPresence. Hope the hiccups are gone now.
We all love OmniFocus and appreciate your work. Thanks :-)
Remorsefully? This is part of the growing pains when we switch to the newest version of a software package. Things 3 will probably have some growing pains of its own to experience as well.
That’s very good to hear! :)
Maybe you could implement an option for WebDAV-users to “Sync after every change”, this would help me and probably others a lot! So whenever something is changed, right away the sync is triggered…
@kcase: Thanks for detailed answer.
In order to fully understand: “this only helps when OmniFocus is running” means that OF needs to be the front application (currently visible on the home screen) on every of the iOS devices, not OF is running, but currently in the background?
Thomas
Yes, that’s correct. Unfortunately, iOS apps are not allowed to subscribe to Bonjour notifications when they’re in the background at the present time. (We’ve requested the ability for an app to ask iOS to wake it when a Bonjour notification happens, similar to the way iOS handles push and location- and time-based notifications. Perhaps in a future OS update. But in the meantime…)
We’re exploring adding a push notification service which devices could use to tell other devices when they’ve synced—which would not only let the iOS apps receive notifications when they’re in the background, it would also let them receive those notifications when they’re not connected to the same local network. (A downside to this approach is that it will require Internet access to a centralized server. We’ll probably make this optional to preserve the ability for OmniFocus to sync over private, isolated networks.)
Firing up an iPhone’s radio each time someone makes an edit will really cut into its battery life. But it’s probably worth considering as an option—I guess it’s no worse than using a web app!
@kcase: Thanks, that helps a lot to understand the current mechanism. I will try to leave my iOS devices more often with OF as the latest open application and see whether it works out.
Sounds promising. I think I am referring not only to myself, every improvement of the sync mechanism is really appreciated.
Thomas
One minor note: OmniFocus syncs fastest when all clients have recently synced. This means that when you switch sync servers (and sync up all your clients), you will get faster performance at first, degrading slightly over a few hours or days, depending on your usage. (You’d even get faster syncs by creating a new account on the same server.) In other words, whether you switch from Omni’s server to one in Germany or vice versa, you might see a temporary performance improvement. You probably need to use a server for a week or so to get a fair performance assessment.
