Re: Agenda in MobileOrg for Android

[James Harkins <jamshark70@gmail.com>]

As it happens, one of the lead developers of mobileorg started a
thread on the MobileOrg-Android mailing list asking for issues that
need to be addressed, and features that are needed, before it's ready
for 1.0.

For instance, John Hendy said:

~~
Being able to edit is nice, but that doesn't take advantage of what I
really have the phone with me for - I see my phone as mainly a reminder
machine, not mainly an editing machine, and would love to see MobileOrg
(or some new project) gain the ability to parse every possible agenda
feature used in Org files, so that I can actually receive reminders for
all the items in my Org-mode agenda. If it came with a better way of
simple editing, that would be even better.
~~

Good idea (up to a point, as Marcin pointed out), but writing it here
is of limited utility :) There's a chance of some of it being
implemented if you take the comment to the mobileorg-android issue
tracker.

I'm using MobileOrg and enjoying it in general. I find it terribly
useful and not especially cumbersome. The initial setup was a bit of a
trek for me, because I don't have access to dropbox where I live
(mainland China). Ultimately, because of unreliable connections to
Ubuntu One, I ended up running my own WebDAV server locally and
syncing at home over the WLAN.

Otherwise, the only thing I had to adapt in my org/emacs usage was to
schedule appointments (C-c C-s) instead of using timestamps for them
(C-c .). I'm actually not crazy about that -- I'd rather use
timestamps -- but it does work. (Come to think of it, I should propose
that as one of the 1.0 issues... or check if it's changed since the
last time I tried.) Items with scheduled or deadline timestamps appear
in the Android calendar, and there is a preference in MobileOrg to
attach reminders automatically. (One remaining point here -- another
1.0 issue -- is that creating a new node in MobileOrg with a schedule
or deadline doesn't show up in the phone calendar until after
syncing. I'll bring that up on the M/O mailing list.)

I find that creating new nodes and minor editing of existing ones is
not at all inconvenient. I don't see a big issue for the workflows
that Marcin subsequently identified as being critical for this kind of
app. They're already there.

hjh