Omnifocus, iPhone, GTDtimes and Other News
June 25th, 2008 Oliver Starr - former Editor of GTD TimesCategories | Getting Things Done | Software
Oliver Starr Note: Erratum. This article had a number of errors that have been corrected from the original version.
Applebriefs‘ Jeff Kabbe has done a spectacular job authoring a very detailed review of the GTD task management application Omnifocus. Mac owners have probably seen other applications developed by Omni Group, particuarly OmniOutliner which comes preinstalled on many machines from Apple. The company has also developed OmniGraffle, OmniPlan and roughly half a dozen other useful applications. His review is so comprehensive that it makes no sense for me to do anything except refer you to his blog where you can read it for yourself.
Meanwhile, the guys folks at Omni Group have made a splash of their own by giving folks a preview of their soon to be released iPhone application. In addition to supporting live sync – supposedly even capable of background syncing tasks to Apple’s new MobileMe service and being FREE to registered users of the desktop version of Omnifocus, the iPhone version is also location aware and thus can automatically identify various contexts and provide you with task details that are contextually appropriate.
As you might imagine there’s quite a lot of excitement about this forthcoming application. Omni Group says that it will be released about the same time as the new 3G iPhone goes on sale. You can learn about more about the soon-to-be-released application in the comments on the Omni Group blog
Lastly, there’s a small bit of news for GTDtimes.. Evan Carmichael maintains a list of the 50 top Productivity Blogs. When the updated list was released recently I was dismayed to see that GTDtimes was not listed. I suspected that this might be due to the fact that we only launched in March of this year and that with so many good productivity resources Evan might not have even come across GTDtimes yet.
I figured that I had nothing to lose by writing him a note to introduce ourselves and Evan surprised me by adding GTDtimes to his list as a special mention just below the top eight sites listed in the GTD Category. I thought it was incredibly cool of Evan to take the time to do this – most folks running popular sites probably wouldn’t have been so readily accommodating.
Incidentally, Evan’s Top 50 list is a rich productivity resource and his site is packed with useful content for entrepreneurs, GTD’ers, and really anyone that wants to be more productive, more successful and more balanced in their approach to work and life. I highly recommend you check it out (and mention that GTDtimes sent you).
Don’t see 1.1 on the omnifocus page yet….
Randy
The company is called the Omni Group; the product name is OmniFocus. As far as I know, nobody there has said that the app will be free; in fact, there are several posts on their forum that imply the opposite.
The iphone app looks a lot lie 43actions which is a great piece of GTD software and is donationware. It’s not location aware if that is important to you.
43actions.com
Just wanted to suggest my own iPhone app: “Nozbe – Simply Get it Done” – it’s free in the Appstore and it syncs with the Nozbe.com online service:
http://www.Nozbe.com/
The iPhone app syncs with the cloud
The thing is, that a native iPhone app is cool when it syncs with a cloud service, because only then you can access your stuff from any Mac or Windows based desktop from anywhere in the world and be productive both on the move and behind “any” desk.
My 2 cents.