The Anti-Blog Blog: Everyday Engineering and Architecture

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.