Re: Agenda in MobileOrg for Android

[James Harkins < jamshark70@gmail.com>]

Marcin Borkowski <mbork <at> wmi.amu.edu.pl> writes:

> > 2. When I choose the menu and then "Outline", I can see the outline.
> > But when I choose menu and then "Agenda", I see nothing but the
> > title ("Agenda") and a "plus" button in the upper right corner.
> >
> > (a) Shouldn't there be an agenda on the screen?

No, not yet. This is a new feature, in which you define agenda views in 
MobileOrg, and MobileOrg will refresh those agendas dynamically based on its 
own database. You'll see your MobileOrg edits immediately, without syncing 
back to emacs. (This also means John's guess about choosing agenda views to 
push from emacs is not correct. "Pushed" agendas appear under the Agendas 
heading in the outline. Dynamic agendas are separate.)

If you don't define dynamic agendas within MobileOrg, then the list of 
available dynamic agendas would be empty. What's missing is explanatory text 
onscreen.

This feature indeed has some serious bugs in the currently released version 
(beta, btw -- pre-1.0) but I just saw a notice on the MobileOrg Android 
mailing list that a fix was just checked into the source repository.

> the key seems to be "too hard to use efficiently"...  I am afraid that
MobileOrg for Android) is indeed much more difficult to use than the
Emacs version.  The strength of Org is that it is easy to use (and
efficient in terms of keystrokes etc.).

It might be appropriate to discuss specific use cases that could be improved, 
instead of just stating "it's not efficient." (That's more polite, but it 
conveys about the same amount of useful information as "it sucks" -- i.e., 
none at all).

You did mention syncing. MobileOrg uses a database internally. Maybe that's 
easier to manage in java? I'm only speculating, don't know the reason for 
sure. It's a reasonable guess that parsing org files in java could be more 
difficult than in ELisp. Anyway, I haven't found the syncing requirement to be 
especially onerous. At least, the benefits of MobileOrg are significant enough 
for me that syncing does not negate them.

E.g., my department sent a sms to my phone explaining upcoming holiday 
schedules. I copied the text into a new node (while away from the computer) 
and later, synced. When some students asked what was up with the schedule, it 
was just a couple of taps on my phone to navigate the headings and read it.

The point being, MobileOrg is actually quite useful for capturing notes, 
adding calendar events etc on-the-go, and integrating that into the emacs org 
files.

hjh