Not abandoned, so what do you want to see next?

[webframp]

Hey folks, sorry for making anyone think this project is abandoned. It has been challenging to stay active as a sole maintainer but I still use the currently released MobileOrg daily. I have not had sufficient time to work on ideas and improvements the last year since even having current development hardware has been difficult. In all honesty I'm also not a great iOS developer on my own..

I want to prioritize what the active community wants, so what do you want to see fixed or added in the next version of MobileOrg?

My personal workflow on desktop heavily uses org and org-roam. I tend to use MobileOrg for capture and read only viewing of current org notes. A lot has changed with org since OrgMobile was originally written and the sync process I feel needs to be improved as the primary focus but I need feedback from other users and what they would like to see to know where to focus efforts.

[stormlash]

Thank you for your continued work on this, @webframp. I use MobileOrg constantly (multiple times per day), also exclusively for capture and read-only viewing, and there are a few things that would make my usage dramatically better that I also think would be fairly low-impact to implement; please let me know if any of these aren't clear:

• Sort results when searching for items based on the order they appear in the source org file; right now, these items seem to be unordered.
  • When clicking an item that turned up in a search, rather than just listing the header that matched without any context, jump to that entry in the outline (so it becomes possible to examine parent trees and subtrees).
• Reevaluate the detail view that appears when clicking on a header without any subtrees. I don't care about having the todo state, priority, or tags broken out the way they're listed, and would much rather just have the full header displayed as it appears in the source file. I frequently have plain text notes included immediately after my headers, and I'm currently not able to see these except by holding down on a todo item and clicking "view item as document"
• Provide an integration to the Shortcuts app to allow for appending items to the capture buffer or triggering searches. (Currently I have to do this by manually appending to the files on webdav, and this sometimes causes sync errors). It would be great to be able to have a Siri shortcut to directly capture a voice note into a capture buffer.
• Opportunistic sync (Sync when a remote file has been updated; Auto sync when a capture is completed; only update files that have been modified; sync in the background). I sync over webdav and it typically takes about ten seconds for a full sync to complete for me.
• UI updates. I think the UI could be updated to improve usability without making any major changes. For example:
  • Rather than a search tab, just make the search bar either a persistent UI element at the bottom of the screen or something you pull-down on the outline to reveal. This would also allow for searching within a subtree
  • Move the settings to a small icon in the top right corner of the screen
  • Make a "capture" button in the bottom right corner of the screen. Add "Captured items" as a top level item on the default outline view

[webframp]

Great suggestions @stormlash thanks!

[webframp]

I'm an org roam user and have been thinking about workflows for it a lot lately, I've learned from folks like @d12frosted about how they use org roam so I wonder what their process is like on mobile devices.

[pashazz]

Hey! It'd be great to use git sync

[gitonthescene]

There is now org-mode support in lsp-mode. This offers real potential to standardize org-mode and with standardization a chance to leverage tools to do finer parsing.

One step on that journey might be to make “mobile approved” org files and add linter support to lsp-org. Then we might know that it say conforms to a strict BNF parser. We might require a tag which indicates mobile compatibility. The idea is not to make MobileOrg more narrowly applicable but rather to skirt nasty edge cases which prevent progress.

As a more mundane suggestion it would be nice to have rendered previews of new “Captured” notes as well as edited notes. I had other ideas which escape me presently. Will post back if I can dredge them up.

[whatacold]

Hi Sean,

I'm so excited that you're still maintaining this awesome app, it
helps me a lot to take advantage of my time and stay focused while I
am out and don't have org-mode at my hands. Thanks!

I use MobileOrg for both GTD and note reviewing, here are a few features that I would like to have:

1. Able to set font size, the curent font size is too small for me
2. Able to edit one node's content even if it has sub-nodes
3. Able to add new nodes under a node
4. Notification support for scheduled tasks and or deadlines
   P.S. beorg supports this quite well.

[gitonthescene]

Another idea is to allow uploading your org files via the Share feature.

BTW, has anyone tried to build this recently? I just did and ran into the following error:

Showing Recent Messages
No Account for Team "59B7VFRF7R". (Add a new account in Accounts settings or verify that your accounts have valid credentials.)

Also getting Command PhaseScriptExecution failed with a nonzero exit code.

[webframp]

Really appreciate the suggestions from everyone. Here's a quick update on what's taken so long.

My previous (old) development laptop died and it has taken me a while to save up sufficient funds to buy a new development machine. However I was able to and have just recently gotten a new machine that I can continue development of MobileOrg on.

I still use it every day and have lots of pain points that I'd like to address, so I appreciate everyone who chooses to contribute and support the app by using it! I am committed to keeping this app available in the Apps Store and free of charge, I am not trying to make money by supporting this app.

My first plan is look at the build system with latest Xcode release and see what needs to be fixed. I hope this will address the problem @gitonthescene encountered. Until recently I wasn't even able to look into it.

Features I would like to see (in no particular order):

• git sync
• improved structure editing (plain org does a nicer job at this)
• improved mobile editing experience
• improved capture experience (more like Drafts)
• easy org roam integration (at least comparable to logseq and similar)
• better agenda support
• time tracking
• notifications

[gitonthescene]

FWIW, this was on my laptop running Sonoma 14.5 on an M2 chip.

Also, I think that rewriting the parser using a grammar should help with some of these tasks. Even though there is no official grammar for org-mode there are a few out there used for the 3rd party tools. I've also suggested before that there's no reason you couldn't only (fully?) support a stricter grammar and simply provide a "linter" to be used with emacs, perhaps using lsp-mode.

[lenehc]

Hello, thanks for your hard work! I use MobileOrg simply for capture, although I would like to use it for browsing my org files, presently I find that the "node-by-node" viewing isn't really ideal for quickly reading over files. The Document view is also lacking comprehensibility, the only way to distinguish headers is by eyeing the font size, which is hard to do with more than 3 levels deep of nested headings. A way to be able to distinguish the hierarchy, by numbering the headings or indenting for example, would be much appreciated.