By far, one of the most popular implementations of GTD on a Mac, is with OmniFocus. It does an elegant job of GTD project and action management on the Mac and iPhone. There’s a great write up from the “Mac Samurai”about his journey with GTD & OmniFocus. We thought you might find this useful.
(Yes, we know many of you like “Things” by Cultured Code too!)
Having seen the enormous success that Apple has had with the App Store and the way in which it appears to have single handedly altered the landscape of the mobile phone software market (at least in the US), Google has wasted no time in announcing their answer to Apple’s very successful offering, the Android App Market.
From a cursory view it looks like the guys and gals at the iPhone Dev Team not only did all the hard thinking for Apple when they created Installer.app and the infrastructure of the application environment that allowed users of jailbroken phones to find and load applications on their devices, but from what I can see it appears that they did most of the htinking for Google as well. I hope they get credit for their hard and innovative work.
At least this partially answers one of the big questions that developers had about Android applications; how they are going to get paid - which was a question I asked in a piece I authored for the Register Developer several months ago.
Of course how successful this will be depends upon the execution of the market. It will be difficult to top the ease of use that the Apple App Store delivers, if for no other reason than the standardized platform that the App Store services. How Google will make it as streamlined and user-friendly as the Apple product while still providing a way to differentiate between different handsets is still an open question. Another is whether the market will be as attractive to developers as Apple has become. When developing for Apple, developers know up front the potential universe of customers and they only have to write an application once. With Android the market is still fragmented which means, among other things, that the developer knows up front that either they are going to have to author many iterations of their applcation or be accessible to only a fraction of the possible market. Neither choice is appealing and both come with obvious costs.
For the end user though this state of affairs isn’t all bad and as competition heats up between the iPhone and other devices it is likely that one way that the manufacturers will try to make each platform that much more appealing is by offering more and cheaper applications. Clearly, the winner here is going to be the end user so long as the applications that are being developed are actually worth downloading. At this point I have enough iPhone flashlights and versions of sudoku to last me into the next century. What I don’t have is a decent graphing calculator, an alarm clock with a loud enough buzzer or a way to actually record a call on the iPhone from the iPhone. When will the developers actually tackle these tougher problems and when, for god’s sake, will we finally get cut and paste?
TUAW is reporting that “Outpost“, an application still under development, will make Basecamp even more useful by supporting management of the application via your iPhone. Details are still fairly sparse at this time and it looks like we’ll have to wait a few more weeks to really see what the folks building Outpost are doing with their UI as even the images on their website state that they are under development and subject to change.
A lot of people are pretty excited about this developing software. Basecamp, by 37 signals is a very popular application, and many folks that follow the GTD productivity strategy have found that Basecamp is one of the most efficient and effective tools for helping to keep track of commitments, projects and the next actions that they entail.
Say what you will, the iPhone has changed more about the mobile space inside of a year than the Nokia N-Series, All Samsung devices, and the Motorola Razr combined have in the last five.
Sorry for the rhyming singlet above, I usually can refrain but couldn’t help myself for this little tidbit of good news. Windows users in the know have long benefit from the kind folks at Giveaway of the Day or GOTD as they call it. However up until February Mac users had been left out in the cold. Well, no longer, these cool people received a deluge of mail from Mac-addicts begging for a little love of their own, and like any company that has the sense to “have a clue” they listened to what people wanted and stepped up to deliver.
Now, I realize that this is hardly breaking news since it was announced on the 8th of February - but I wasn’t aware of this until this morning and so I imagine that at least a few people out there probably missed the news as well. In any case, for those that are wondering if all they give away is stuff you’d never want anyway, if you’d found them yesterday you woud have been able to download your own copy of the Evernote Beta for the Mac, totally free, a $49.95 value..
Sadly, it’s too late to get a copy of Evernote, but there are sure to be other cool programs available tomorrow and the next day and the day after that and…
