This continues to be an issue for me. I just checked my list and noticed that an item is missing... an item I added this morning with my iPhone.

Nobody else has this problem? Nobody even wants to discuss it?

I think that anytime you have RTM open on your iPhone/iTouch it will initiate an update after a few seconds and synchronize with the website information. The key thing is to open the program on the device itself. See the iPhone app FAQ under synchronizing - - https://www.rememberthemilk.com/services/iphone/faq/

In addition to that, Emily and I generally suggest that you synchronize when you're done using RTM and are ready to close it out. Unfortunately, there's no way to synchronize when exiting (since it exits immediately) or in the background, but getting in the habit of synchronizing when done is pretty effective.

I know there is no ability to do this in the background, but from the iPhone FAQ, I read:

"After this, the app will periodically sync around every 5 minutes while the app is open."

I know that getting into the habit of syncing manually would be really good. Having the option to get some help from the software would be nice, though. For instance, it would be nice if we could opt into having "add item", "postpone item", "complete item", "" and "delete item" fire off this sync automatically instead of having to remember to sync ourselves.

Anyway, happy to see some response here. :)

Any change should be immediately synced to the web. On an iPhone, users are quickly moving between apps, popping into RTM to mark something complete and exiting. It is counter-productive to make us sync every time we do something - it should be done immediately and without us knowing.

You don't have to synchronize every time you do something; RTM will keep a local copy if you exit and synchronize at the next opportunity. So willw, in your case, if you're moving between apps, RTM may not synchronize when you exit, but it will sync as soon as you open it up again.

Our suggestion is that if you're making a lot of changes, particularly if you'll be expecting push notifications for any of them, to synchronize before you exit at the end. For example, if you're making a list of items to buy at the grocery store, you may be in and out of RTM while you're scanning your cupboards and whatnot, but if you synchronize by the time you're done with the list, you'll have the whole list on the server.

In general, syncing on every change is inefficient. The difference in sync time for one change and ten is minimal; most of the time spent synchronizing is in establishing the connection, authenticating, handshaking, etc. Not only would it cause more server load, but if you're not on a super-fast connection, you'd find that RTM would be constantly synchronizing, which would be more resource-intensive.

I suppose this reveals one limitation on Apple's decision to go with background notifications instead of allowing applications to run in the background. If the app (or a sync handler) could run in the background then it could sync when you've finished up using RTM iphone and are going about your business.

It is unfortunate to get in the habit of forcing a manual sync when closing the app.

This has caught me out a few times recently also. After some confusing instances of tasks still appearing online that I'd marked as complete on iPhone, I started to wonder if something was amiss and ended up here.

I understand the reasons given for not having immediate syncs. In lieu of that, could you add an icon in the app that indicates when there are unsynced iPhone-originating updates? Evernote's iPhone app has a similar feature that's quite intuitive.

I also wish it'd sync changes as you made them if you have Sync in Settings set to Auto.

agree with "andrewski"