feature request: "views" syncronized from PC to iphone(through WIFI)

[li fermi]

It's a very good app! Thank you! 

I think the "views" part is very important for productivity improving, so it could be better if we can sync the newly created "views" from PC to iPhone through Wifi, whileas there are only a "fixed" view list to select from in the iphone version.

Thanks!

fermi

[David Jade]

Yes! Same views, same features, synced everywhere. Not having the same views is what keeps me from using the iOS versions.

[Gerd]

Just my opinion. I support this feature request.

[Dwight Arthur]

This thread is one of several where users are discussing their desire to build a custom view on one platform and sync it to another platform. Six of us in the beta testing team have talked this through and come up with a proposal. I'm writing to explain why it's difficult to do this, and what can be done about it. I hope that members of this forum will read it through and offer your comments about this issue and how it should be resolved.

The problem

Custom filters are made very differently on Windows and on mobile platforms. This discussion is based on Android as I haven't seen the new iPhone custome views but I believe they are pretty similar. On Windows there's a three-part filter, with a fieldname, a verb, and values, like (Caption CONTAINS "downtown"). You can get quite fancy under some circumstances, for example ((DueDateTime OnOrAfter 25Dec2013) AND (DueDateTime OnOrBefore 01Jan2014)) will find dasks due between Christmas and New Years. The mobile views are simpler, with just two fields, fieldname and condition, like (Caption "Downtown") or (DueDate NextMonth). There's no way to create a view on mobile that shows something like tasks between Christmas and New Years. To build a translator that would transform one of these formats to the other would be a huge task which would fail whenever you hit a formation that could be built on one side but not the other.

The Proposal

 People who use MLO on more than one device will want to be able to develop a custom view on any device and use it on all of them. This is true whether the devices are diverse (Two Windows laptops, an Android phone and an iPad) or uniform (two Windows laptops and a Windows desktop). The propagation of new and changed views across multiple devices should not require effort on the part of the user, and therefore a mechanism like cloud sync would be appropriate.

 An obstacle to meeting this expectation is the fundamental incompatibility between the structure of view definitions across platforms. A suggested way to overcome this incompatibility would be to introduce into the Windows view definition, a checkbox per view asking if the user prefers "standard" versus "compatible" view definitions. Standard would work like the current implementation of Advanced Filter. Compatible would change the available choices to those supported on other platforms. For example the second (verb) field of a filter for StartDateTime would be limited to the values "is" and "is not" and the third field would offer values set, not set, yesterday, today, tomorrow, day after tomorrow, this week, this month, next week, next month, in the next 7 days, in the last 7 days, in the next 30 days. in the last 30 days, future. past. Compatible views would be synchronized by cloud or wifi sync, but standard views would not be.

Request

Please reply to this thread with your thoughts on this. The proposal adds to MLO's complexity, is it too much? Do you see a simpler solution? Is view portability important enough to you to warrant development of something like this?

Acknowledgements

This proposal was developed from contributions by TimV, Stéph, SRhyse, MATSURU and Lisa S. Sorry if I missed anyone 

-Dwight

[David Jade]

My first thoughts relate to this one point: there should be no difference between custom views between clients. THIS is what keeps me from fully embracing the mobile clients. I depend on my views to make MLO flexible enough to fit my workflow. 

For instance, being able to filter out "suspended" projects and/or certain tasks that don't use a certain context (vs. including every context except some) from the Active Actions view. To do this I've found that I need to use the Advanced filter options. So now I have views that work great on my desktop but on my mobile devices I get completely different lists of task.

This is ultimately what it boils down to for me: if the tasks lists aren't the same everywhere, I can't use MLO everywhere. Syncing them is just one part of the problem - having them match even if I have to create them manually is a much bigger part of the problem, IMHO.

[Mark]

Dwight,

First of let me say that I believe I could live with this proposal, on the basis that something is better than nothing :-)  I suspect for 80% of what we do this would be enough anyway.

However, one question I have is why are the custom views different, because there is a fundamental limitation on mobile platforms, or simply because the apps have been designed that way???