The Anti-Blog Blog: Everyday Engineering and Architecture

Adium 1.4 beta does Twitter and Facebook! Awesome, awesome.

Always looking for things that let me pare down the number of clients I use and make my life simpler.

The good news is that just released update to VirtualBox v2.1.2 fixes a couple of the issues that I had installing the Windows 7 beta on my Mac.

In 2.1.2 (released this morning) there's a specific Windows 7 entry in the dropdown when you create a new machine, i.e. where you chose Vista. And the 2.1.2 guest additions work without needing compatibility mode.

Hooray! (I guess I was a day early and a dollar short -- jumped the gun installing the beta on VirtualBox)

Well installing the Windows 7 Beta on top of Virtual Box 2.1 on my Apple MacBook Pro wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be. Virtual Box pretty much made it a snap quite frankly.

Started up Virtual Box...

• Selected "New"...
• Chose "Windows" and "Vista 32-bit" from the operating system options...
• Entered "1024MB" or 1GB for virtual memory size for my new virtual machine...
• Bumped up the video memory to "64MB"...
• Told it I wanted to start a "New" virtual hard drive and used the default of "20GB" for it...
• Edited the settings for DVD and Audio... mounted the DVD drive that contained the Windows 7 Beta DVD I burned from the ISO the other day... configured the audio for "Core Audio" and "Sound Blaster 16" driver...

Then started the virtual box...

Windows then began to load and start the install process from the DVD. Neat. Notice I said "neat" not "fast". My MacBook Pro isn't the newest or fastest so it wasn't speedy for the install but still was acceptable. I'll have to repeat this on my iMac that *is* newer and faster to see if things improve.

Results so far...

• Sound did not work. I will have to change the driver or install the VBox Guest Tools...
• Network worked fine and Windows even found 2 updates, installed them and then rebooted
• Changed my login picture and my theme...
• Bumped video memory up to 128MB, checked "enable" 3D acceleration

VirtualBox Guest Tools

• Attempted to install VirtualBox Guest Additions and it came back and said "unsupported" OS
• Un-installed the additions
• Re-installed using XP compatibility mode... so rather than running with AutoPlay, right clicked into preferences --> compatibility --> Windows XP 32-bit, then ran the VirtualBox Guest Additions
• that's much better now... video driver scales the display when I resize it and mouse works across windows

Audio

• Changed audio back to default of "Core Audio" and "ICH AC97" ... upon reboot Windows 7 found the device and installed the device driver... dummy me for not just taking the defaults... doh!... works like a champ now.

Suspend / Resume

• So far suspend or resume isn't quite working

And VirtualBox 2.1.2 is released today! Get your copy at http://www.virtualbox.org

One of the frustrating parts with using Solaris 10 under xVM is the lack of shared folder support with the native host. I really didn't want to enable any extra services on my MacBook Pro and serve up files directly from there.

So what did I end up doing? Using my Apple Time Capsule of course!

I already had a volume on the Apple Time Capsule, so it was really just a matter of enabling the Samba client from within the Solaris 10 virtual machine and then mounting it within my home directory. It was a little tricky because the user name / volume on the Time Capsule has a space in it.

Here's the step-by-step:

1. Enable Samba Client within Solaris

dpickens-AT-opencomms:~$ pfexec svcadm enable network/smb/client

2. Use the 'smbutil' to browse the volumes being shared out

dpickens-AT-opencomms:~/$ smbutil view '//Dave Pickens@10.0.0-DOT-94'
Password: #&@#&@#*
Share Type Comment
-------------------------------
Dave Pickens disk
IPC$ IPC
primary disk

3 shares listed from 3 available

3. Create a mount point under your home directory
dpickens@opencomms:~/$ mkdir mnt

4. Mount the CIFS volume
dpickens@opencomms:~/mnt$ mount -F smbfs '//Dave Pickens@10.0.0-DOT-94/Dave Pickens' /export/home/dpickens/mnt
Password: #&@#^@$


This account is setup as a privileged user, so some of these commands don't need pre-faced by 'pfexec'.
With all of this done, I now have the ability to easily share files between the native Mac OS X side, the Virtual Solaris 10 machine and the Virtual Windows XP desktop under xVM on my Apple MacBook.

Andy takes a first look at OmniFocus

Some of his findings and impressions mirror my own, especially around the Inspector.

Andy Ihnatko's got a good review of Blogo, a Mac blogging application, over at his Celestial Waste of Bandwidth

I like the interface look-and-feel. Very Mac-esque and clean.

In short, Andy says it looks interesting but falls a bit short.

Me, I am sticking with Ecto for now.

Just read over at MacSparky that OmniGroup is getting their hands on the iPhone SDK. Plans are for them to bring out some form of mobile OmniFocus app. Might push OmniFocus to the forefront someday with my getting things done app. Oh but I'll need the iPhone now too. :)

Summary of Results

Of the three applications reviewed, iGTD, OmniFocus and Things, there was no single one that stood out as clearly "the best". Each offered it's own take on getting things done. Each has it's pros and cons which I'll summarize here.

iGTD

Overall iGTD is the most mature of the 3 tested and it shows. It has the most integration points and options which is also it's downfall in terms of complexity. It does balance that out nicely with being able to see everything about a single event item on one screen. For those people that need the high level of integration and are power users, iGTD (and soon to be iGTD 2) is likely to be their choice out of these 3 apps.

Pros - mega-integration, been around for a while, cost (can't beat free)

Cons - too many bells and whistles for novice, overkill for some people

OmniFocus

OmniFocus is not the newest kid on the block but close. And it shows. There are still some rough edges that need smoothed out. It offers a typical OmniGroup experience in terms of look-and-feel, good or slightly better than good. It also follows OmniGroup's strive towards data safety in that it's the only one of the 3 to offer automatic database backups. It offers a modest amount of integration (iCal and Mail app) which will suffice for most users. All of this comes at a price though - while I found the look-and-feel to be more crisp and clean than iGTD, OmniFocus seems more complex due to the Inspector issue and some of the drop-down menus.

Pros - it's made by OmniGroup, good look-and-feel, automatic database backup

Cons - still rough around the edges, can't see everything about an event on single screen (eg. need the inspector), too many bells and whistles for novice, seemingly more complex (though cleaner look-and-feel) than iGTD

Things

I am glad I had Things to review as it was a nice contrast to iGTD and OmniFocus. Straightforward and simple. No bells and whistles. Overall it had a very clean design and interface. Yes, it is pre-release and rough around the edges - more so than OmniFocus. Things makes a great basic To Do tracker and gets you started more quickly than either of the other 2 (once you get your tagging system established).

Pros - simple, great for the novice

Cons - still pre-release, no integration

Finale

Well as some of you may have read, I hedged my bets as not to lose out on the OmniFocus pre-release discount. Maybe not the wisest move after completing the reviews of all 3 products but it does give me options.

For me Things is the one. As I said in my posting on requirements for this kind of app, I wanted something "one louder" than iCal. Things is just that, "one louder" than iCal - nothing fancy but it'll do the trick.

So for the next month or so I will be using Things daily to get my To Do's done. I'll always have OmniFocus to fall back on. (Oh and I guess iGTD since it's free.)

A colleague of mine suggested Things by Cultured Code when the discussion about enhanced To Do lists and Getting Things Done came up on the internal Sun Mac alias. He said he'd been using it for over a year and was very pleased with how it worked for him. So I decided to take a look at it and include it in the reviews.\

Things

At first glance you wonder if this application will actually help you get things done. The answer is yes it will. Things by Cultured Code is much simpler in mosts ways that either iGTD or OmniFocus. That does not mean it doesn't help you get things done though. In fact, I pretty much found that it helps you get started down the path of getting organized more quickly than either iGTD or OmniFocus because of this simplicity.



Overall Things has a nice, clean and simple interface as you can see above. Better in my opinion that iGTD or OmniFocus for someone who is just starting down the GTD pathway (eg. novice).

Entering a task is easy. There's only one thing that is required and that is the task name. All other fields are option and there aren't that many fields - title, tags, notes, due date and reminder. Simple. A nice feature for entering tasks, is a system-wide hotkey allowing you to make an entry into your Inbox no matter which application you're in. The pop-up looks vaguely Dashboard like and works nicely.

The notes field for each item supports dragging and dropping of links and files correctly, though every appears as a URL and there are no icons. Direct entry of a URL does not convert it to a clickable link however, nor does the field support any formatting of the text at all. Again very simple, there are no options here.

Everything is organized by tags in Things. Whether it's a tag for priority such as "Urgent" or where that particular task might have to be done such as "Work", everything is managed by tags. That said, it's not hard to do except for one little thing -- it's largely a blank slate when you initially launch the program. You have to define the majority of the tags yourself. That, in of itself sometimes, is a chore and where I rely heavily upon other programs to assist me by providing the framework. Luckily I came across Ian Beck's post on the Things Wiki regarding tagging examples. So with about 5 mins of effort I was able to get things ready for tagging.



Following the "GTD" methodology of collecting, processing, organizing, reviewing and doing, Things offers a simple structure for organizing your tasks, four buckets - today, tomorrow, someday and postponed. I really like the "someday" bucket because I often have ideas and projects that really have no particular due date, or start date for that matter. Things handles these "someday" tasks and projects better than the other programs I've reviewed to-date. These four buckets can handle non-project related tasks that just need to be done and that aren't really related to each other.

For things that are grouped together, Things offers projects and areas. Projects are groups of tasks that related and once completed, complete the project. Areas are a collection of projects or tasks related to something that as a whole cannot be completed. For me this was a macro grouping of Work, Home and Life.

Completed projects and tasks are archived in the Logbook for future reference. This takes place either manually or automatically on a regular basis -- immediately upon completion, daily, weekly or monthly.

Things also has the ability to have tasks assigned to Teammates. Teammates is integrated with the Apple AddressBook. The teammate must, in fact, be in your address book. Right now the only thing the Teammate function does is allow you to assign a task to a teammate. It does not email them the task nor is there any collaboration on the task (eg. they can't mark it complete, you still have to do that. This is one area that needs a little sharpening but it's a good start.



There is no integration with iCal, or most anything for that matter, at this point but it's early on in the overall life cycle of the product and quite frankly sometimes little integration is absolutely necessary. Simpler is sometimes just better.

Yes it does support clinking on the links to files and webpages as mentioned in the paragraph above on Notes. It also does lookups as mentioned in AddressBook for team mates. Ok, so there's some very basic integration that is expected when working on a Mac.

Things is not released as of yet, but for pre-release code I found it very stable and usable. Pre-release pricing of $39.95 can be locked in simply by signing up for the mailing list through January 31, 2008. Estimated release date is Spring 2008 sometime.

Help right now is rather thin because this is a pre-release application. Help consists mostly of re-direction to the Things Wiki page which is not complete but fairly well populated and useful. There is a nice screen cast by Ian Beck of Tagamac.com and it does a wonderful job of walking you through most of the features in the alpha release. Hopefully it will be updated when Things is finally released.

Things is simple and was very easy to start using to get things done. For those that don't need or require integration with Apple Mail or iCal, a like clean and simple, Things is it.

Ok, I just like the name MacSparky for a blog. What Apple Mac user at Sun wouldn't? :)

Anyway, David over at MacSparky does a fine job reviewing OmniFocus.

Well I decided to play it safe or at least hedge my bets somewhat.
The OmniFocus at $39.95 was too good to pass up. So I went ahead and purchased a copy at the pre-release price.
The OmniGroup website is still advertising the $39.95 when I first posted this entry.

I also signed up for the newsletter over at Cultured Code website to lock in my 20% off. You have until Jan. 31st to sign-up and it doesn't cost you anything until they release Things.

And so it continues...

I forgot to mention a couple interesting features or differentiators in the previous posting about iGTD.

Specifically it does few things which none of the other packages I looked at do:

• Ability to hide the window after some period of inactivity

• Put an icon in the Menu Bar

• Keep iGTD on top of other windows

This makes it a little easier to deal with having it running on the time. Something I've found that too that would be nice when using iCal -- it tends to get in the way. Plus Apple took away one of the short cut keys that I used to use to bring iCal to "today" when it was minimized. {sigh}

I have to say (admit, confess, whatever) upfront that I use and generally love OmniGroup products. So much so that I own (as in actually went out and spent the money) for OmniGraffle Pro, OmniPlan and OmniOutliner.

This review may not be entirely thorough because time is of the essence here. You see there's a 50% discount on OmniFocus that expires really soon (as in today - January 7, 2008). So part of this process is accelerated to figure out if OmniFocus is worth $39.95 or if I miss the discount, is it worth $79.95.

Though I do like that OmniGroup is actually giving you an extra 2.5 cent break off the 50% off deal. ;)

OmniFocus

Right now, OmniFocus is pre-release as I write this. They've been in alpha and beta testing for just about a year now. Release date is scheduled for January 8th, 2008. That said, the product is pretty stable though I expect continuing updates to happen frequently as the month and year progresses. Even in the "vaportrail" of these pre-releases, it checks for updates and keeps itself updated as I expect any Mac application should.

Main User Interface

It looks like OmniGroup leveraged their experience with OmniOutliner to build this interface -- and that's a good thing. It's clean and crisp, as well as pretty straight forward. My only issue initially was that many of the columns you see on the screen shot above were hidden out-of-the box. Finding how to "unhide" them wasn't quite obvious and I think that many people would like at least a few of them turned on by default. But it was easy enough to fix.

Context Mode vs. Planning Mode

As with many of the GTD type of products they use "context" to describe where or how you are currently working (eg. phone). OmniFocus uses contexts but also lets you view, group and categorize your tasks into projects and groups. The Mode toggle at the top left of the interface let's you easily move between Planning and Context mode. All three products support "context" in some manner or fashion.

Organizing Things

OmniFocus allows you to organize things into Projects and Groups as well as Folders, so there's no shortage of ways to organize yourself using whatever method you want.

Task Entry

Task entry at first appears straight forward at first. That is until you need to access some of the additional fields or repeat functions, then it's time to pop-up the Inspector. Sigh. It's a love-hate relationship here. Appreciate the desire to keep the interface clean and clutter free but then you make me pull up the inspector? This isn't OmniGraffle and I can't recall the last time I used the Inspector routinely in OmniOutliner.

Start and Due Dates

Basic start and due dates are here. These columns did not appear on the main UI until I unhid them. You do not have the ability to "reminder" or pester based upon due dates.

Effort / Estimated Time

This is something that neither iGTD or Things offers. A simple way to enter an estimated duration. The other two products track difficulty (easy, medium, hard) or however, in more subjective terms. OmniFocus tracks effort using minutes and hours. Interesting dilemma here... time based estimates or subjective estimates?

Notes

One thing about most OmniGroup products like OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner is the way they handle text formatting. It's the same or nearly so across all products. So when I want to format something in a different font or size, it's fairly intuitive if you use one of their other products. And it's the same here using OmniFocus, formatting works like you expect and remains so unlike iGTD.

There are several drawbacks to the notes sections. Not completely obvious to a novice how to actually add a Note to a task. You end up having to hunt for the Edit Notes selection in the Edit menu, eventually memorizing the quick key combination. Would have much preferred the ability to right-click the mouse and see "Edit/Add Note". Even "Edit Note" throws people off, "I don't have a note yet, how can I edit it?!?"

There's have to manually cut-and-paste links within notes or drag-and-drop them from your browser. There's no super short cut in getting a link from your browser to the Note. Most of the other programs are like that so it's not a significant issue or drawback.

Within a Note on a task, you can imbed a link to a document or file. However, there's a big glitch here in that it only shows an icon for the file type and nothing to indicate what exactly that file might be. Is it a copy of the itinerary for the trip? Or is it a release and waiver?

In short on notes, there are some good pluses and some negatives. I think OmniGroup needs to do a bit of spit-and-polish here in an upcoming patch to make this area of functionality a bit cleaner and better.

Repeating Tasks

OmniFocus offers the ability to repeat tasks as many other task management products do. The way that it's implemented is different still than other applications like this. They allow you to set the task to repeat every some many {minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years} which is pretty standard. The unique thing they add to this function is the ability to configure this from either the start (assigned) date or completion date of the task.

Periodic Reviews

One thing that OmniFocus allows is period reviews for a particular project. So for longer term projects you can set it to review every week or month. Kind of like a specialized reminder. It's a nice thing to have, especially in light of the fact they don't do reminders.

Inspector

As with many OmniGroup products, they have this thing called Inspector which lets you view the properties of an item. Unfortunately in the case of OmniFocus, this is required to access some commonly used fields for a task. I found it got in the way and a distraction since I almost always had it up.

Sequencing -- Parallel vs. Serial

There's no explicit way to set up tasks serially except to drag-and-drop. Provided, that you have the project setup as a serial or parallel project. OmniFocus allows you to set whether a project is serial in nature (eg. tasks go in order) or parallel (eg. you can do tasks in any order). The only drawback is that it's hard to see sometimes whether a project is serial or parallel based upon the User Interface. I'd like to see something like numbering turned on or off depending. So tasks have numbers if it's serially driven (something I liked when I tried to use OmniOutliner as a task manager) and bullets or nothing if it's parallel. The one good thing about this feature is that you can switch a project back and forth between serial and parallel without any major work or issues.

Integration and Synchronization

OmniFocus does a good job of integration with the basic Apple applications. Better perhaps than the other task managers in this review. Probably for the very simple reason that they've had the longest history working with Apple Mac OS vis-a-vi their other products.

Mail

Integration with the built-in Mail App is decent and is better than iGTD I feel. iGTD only lets you turn an email into a task when actually in front of the Mail App. OmniFocus on the other hand is looking for the "+omnifocus" as a folder name. Overall it's solid and the one nice feature is that it will archive the process messages off to a specific folder once it's done reading them.

Only drawback is that you can't have a folder named "omnifocus" on your mail server in your account and some messaging systems might do other things with messages trying to deliver them to folders (eg. auto-create that folder or bounce the message). Small price to pay really but too bad it wasn't slightly more configurable (eg. look for "foo@sun.com" in the "To: "). Luckily this worked for me. :)

iCal

OmniFocus' integration with iCal is slightly more configurable than iGTD's from what I could tell in this limited trial. The biggest difference is that you're not required to create one calendar per context rather you can specify which context(s) should sync with which calendar.

It worked pretty well and I like the idea that if I can configure whether or not the task goes away in OmniFocus if deleted in iCal.

Spotlight

Did not have a significant period of time to test the Spotlight integration with OmniFocus. But if it works as well as it does with their other products then finding tasks and projects should be a breeze with this integration.

Annoyances and Downsides

There were more than a couple annoyances and downsides with the OmniFocus application. Not sure how many of these are simply fit-and-finish issues since it's only about ready to be released and how many are major issues that will require some solid effort to address.

One of the biggest peeves is that while it's nice to be able to double click or "open" a project in a separate window, it was very easy to end up with 2 or even 3 windows of the same project in various sizes on my desktop. The good part about this was they all stayed in sync with each other, so it wasn't like the application had to "save" in one window for the entire bunch to be up-to-date (Kudo to OmniGroup on this!)

While OmniGroup products are good. I have noticed a trend for the prices to continually creep up year after year on the various products. At $39.95 it's one kind of decision, at $79.95 it's another. OmniFocus is definitely more expensive compared with iGTD and Things. If I had missed the opportunity to snag it at 1/2 price, I doubt I would be considering it.

Unfortunately OmniFocus offers no real prioritization unless you want to define contexts even further like "Mac : Internet : High Priority". Not sure I want to do that. Then again, priorities change and shift quite fluidly. If I end up spending time managing priorities, wonder how much work I can get done if there are no priorities.

Compared with the other two products, Things and iGTD, OmniFocus offers no tagging or meta data field even though it integrates with Spotlight. Instead it relies upon the notes section. This is pitfall in that the other products use auto-complete for tags so when I type "Apple" it lists the tags I've previously used that begin with "Apple". Without this, you tend to wind up with a tag or something in the notes field that isn't quite the same (eg. MacOSX vs. Mac OS-X).

There's some minor fit-and-finish work to be done when filling in boxes, sizing and dragging-and-dropping. Nothing major but it's still rough around the edges a wee bit. The biggest issue I ran into (besides the cut-and-paste file link only shows icon) when testing was that some options were available only part of the time. You could only get to them after selecting the object, trying the right-click menu, unselecting the object, then re-selecting the object, then trying the right-click menu again. Viola! Now you have the options?!?

Overall

I think that OmniFocus will make a fine addition to the OmniGroup family of applications. In comparison with iGTD and Things, it's more complicated than Things but slight cleaner and easier than iGTD in some areas. If OmniFocus had been around a year ago when I looked at iGTD, I probably would not have gone with iGTD since I liked OmniGroup apps so well.

What I Want from a Getting Things Done App

Well a friend of mine sent me an email asking, "What exactly do you want out of this kind of program Dave?"

I had what I was looking for in my mind, but I thought I should put it down in the blog as part of the series of posts here.

Adherence to good Mac hygiene

Installation should be open a disk image, drag the application to the Application folder, uninstall should be about the same except drag from Application folder to trash. Also should have a way to check for updates and auto-update somehow. All three of these packages meet this criteria.

Ease of use

Most Mac apps are pretty easy to use relative to what they do. So you expect them to behave certain ways. Hide more complex features until you're ready to use them. Keep the clutter in the background until necessary and so forth. Some applications make it harder than it has to be simply to do an entry or be useful. Don't make me have 3 windows open to see my to do list, thank you.

One better (louder) than iCal

Apple's iCal application is great for what it does and how it does it. It does the basic stuff and does it in an easy-to-use fashion. It synchronizes with devices like phones and iPods. And you can synchronize calendars across multiple computers using .Mac or an iCal server via their publish / subscribe model. Integration with Spotlight is a plus too.

It doesn't offer sequencing and there were some things lacking about linking to documents and other applications. Now keep in mind I use Tiger (OS X 10.4) not Leopard (OS X 10.5)

I used iCal for about 3 years for calendaring functions and off-and-on for over a year for "to do" management. It was a love-hate relationship in the "to do" area. I really need something "one louder" than iCal.

One (or two) less than OmniPlan

Not really after a full blown project management software package. I have that and I use that when I need work break down structures (WBS) and roll-ups and *real* project management. My life, while it may seem like it from time-to-time, does not need project management.

Yet I need something slightly more (one louder) than iCal but maybe two notches down from a full blown project management application.

Sequencing

There are times when things must be done in a specific order otherwise you'll end up re-doing the work or simply costing precious time. While it's not a "must have", being able to sequence things is a "strongly desired" function I would like to have. Besides basic *priority*, which changes from day-to-day on some tasks it seems like sequencing is as useful to me if not more so than *priority*.

Some integration

I probably could have put some of this in the *hygiene* part above, but I pulled it out separately. Do I need ultimate integration with anything and everything? No. Basic stuff. Let me cut-and-paste a URL into a notes place or even a field. Then let me click the URL later and open up Safari with that page.

Basic integration with Addressbook. Don't make me use something built-in that's redundant with what I already use (eg. Addressbook). But don't make it hard either. Auto-lookup is best but drag-and-drop is ok.

Hmmm... spotlight integration might be a plus. Not required but would be a nice extra perhaps.

Notes

Give me a place to take basic notes and things. Nothing fancy. Don't need formatting or HTML or anything. Bare bones is fine with me.

Some nagging (but not *too* much)

I want to be reminded like I want to be reminded. Don't nag me but have the ability to set reminders in some reasonable manner. I really dislike reminders that are all-or-nothing. A periodic reminder or review would be good for some tasks while a reminder just prior to the due date is good for other ones. And finally there's that group of tasks which just don't need reminders -- they are long term or perhaps just ideas for future projects.

And now for something completely different... things I might like but don't know how useful (yet).

Synchronization between two (or more) Mac's

Yes I have two Apple's. Both laptops though one is pretty old but still working like a trooper. From time-to-time I take the old one on trips where the risk of damage is greater than normal (eg. camping or family trips) and I don't need to do Sun related projects.

It's really nice to be able to synchronize things between the two Mac's. Do that with a few things right now. Just how useful it would be for this type of application is in question. Most of these trips I am trying to get away from the "to do" list quite frankly.

But it's a great way to backup and recover. That's why I keep the old Mac around.

Synchronization with iCal

I think my only reason here for even thinking about this is that I know Apple is continually improving their applications. So for migration sake, being able to synchronize prevents some lock-in and the option to always go with iCal down the road. It's sort of a safety valve.

For day-to-day use... hmmmm this isn't that appealing or useful for me. Only for specific types of tasks would it be beneficial (eg. phone calls) where I don't need access to the computer. The minute I need access to the computer, internet, etc. for the task, I might as well use the actual application rather than iCal.

Synchronization with Palm

Again, same reasoning behind this as with "synchronizing with iCal" for the most part. The other monkey wrench here is that at some point I intend to get an Apple iPhone and ditch my Treo 700p. (as soon as my Sprint contract runs out).

Level of Effort

It might be nice to keep track of whether a task is Easy, Medium or Hard or perhaps how long it might take to complete. Generally speaking I've found some of my estimates off a bit (as well all have I am sure). So "level of effort" is always a bit suspect to me but sometimes it's a good way for me to get a couple short (easy?) things done when I've only got a few minutes. Then again we all know how that "easy" or "quick" phone call with the bank or {insert not-so-favorite institution name here} can really end up being, right?

First off let's just say that all three of these packages were easy to install and include the ability to check for updates automatically. Removing them is pretty simple as well. So they all pass the fundamental test of at least following the Mac paradigm of installation, update and removal.

For the purposes of this review I took a simple project for an upcoming dive trip to use as an example. it's not the most complex project but I wanted to use something rather basic and generic.

iGTD

I've been using iGTD for a little while now and probably have the most experience with it of the 3 packages I'm reviewing. That said it's not perfect but was the best thing for keeping track of a plethora of tasks and to do's beyond what a Palm device (Treo 700p) and iCal can handle.

The screenshot below is that of the main iGTD window showing projects off to the left, tasks in the upper part of the main screen along with any notes, links, tags and contacts.

Main Tasks Section

Compared with the other programs, this shows a more complete picture of the task at hand. Specifically while OmniFocus or Things might show dates (or only Due Date in the case of Things), neither specifically addresses priority and effort as simply as iGTD does. The downside to this is you lose flexibility somewhat and granularity. Things does everything through tagging and due dates alone. OmniFocus allows start date, due date, duration (minutes / hours) but no specific "priority" but it has other features which will be covered in it's own review.

Setting the Priority for each task was simple -- just mouse over and click on the priority you want for that particular task. Easy. Setting the effort was a little more difficult until I got the hang of it. The Effort being a bar, I was expecting a drag-and-drop but it's also a mouse over and click. Not hard, just takes a while to get accustomed.

iGTD does allow for recurring tasks but does not do anything fancy. It allows recurring every X number of days, weeks or months -- no fancy patterns like every Monday here. If you want that, you'll have to enter that task in iCal or something else.

Notes Section

Notes can be added to each task but formatting / font choices are fixed here. You might be able to change them temporarily but once you save, exit and relaunch you'll get the default font / format back again. Any links you enter within the notes section are not active either -- that's what the Bottom Section is for.

Bottom Section - Meta Data

Adding links is simply a matter of cut-and-pasting or dragging and dropping from your browser. Tags are simply entered and if it's already there, it's auto-filled if not iGTD creates a new tag. Contacts field is integrated with auto-lookup and fill from Addressbook.

Overall this area of the program was pretty simple to use

Integration

iGTD offers quite a bit of opportunity for integration. First off it works with Quicksilver. I'm not a Quicksilver user but I know that it's a large community within the Mac world and know quite of few users myself.

Beyond integrating with Quicksilver, iGTD has the ability to integrate with Apple Mail and pick up new tasks. Unfortunately, this only works if you use Apple Mail. I've tried it and while it's a nice program, I used Thunderbird as my mail application. (It might be time to re-evaluate that but not right just yet)

One neat little piece of integration is iGTD can quickly dump a project or task to Stickies (if you're a stickies fan like I am -- though I am trying to get away from the buggers). Plus if use Apple's Dashboard much, there is a Widget available to add a task quickly to your Inbox too.

The latest revision offers the ability to use a .Mac account to keep your things sync'd across multiple Macs. Neat!

Lastly, iGTD can synchronize with iCal and Palm via iSync, allowing you to see things on the go with your iPod or mobile device. It's great that it's there but generally speaking I find the usefulness limited. Thinking I will only a portion of my projects and lists to my mobile device.

The iGTD website lists many more applications that iGTD integrates with but beyond the ones mentioned here including some of the basics like Safari, I don't use the others.

Final

iGTD has been around the longest of the three packages I am reviewing. In fact a new version iGTD 2 is in Alpha right now -- though it unfortunately only works on Leopard.

Documentation and community around iGTD is pretty good. The price can't be beat -- it's FREE! (Donations are accepted)

There is a iGTD Pro in the works as well. It looks to offer better synchronization across multiple Macs using a central server. Possibly some collaborative things as well. It will be overkill for me. iGTD Basic (what I am using now) will remain free according to the website.

You may have notice I skipped the left panel for "projects". Well in the interest of brevity, all three packages use the "projects" concept to organize tasks. Personally that's not an area where it makes or breaks software in this area for me -- so I am skipping over some things.