Things public preview released

We at Omni are very excited to see the personal task management market continue to grow with new entrants like Things. When I first built Kinkless out of Applescript and duct tape, there were very few "modern" (or GTDable) task management applications. That's definitely changed and everyone interested in personal task management benefits (well, everyone on a Mac, at least ;).

We'll have a pretty nice trial-period policy for OmniFocus once it launches and I encourage anyone interested to try it and compare with the other applications out there and then choose the one that fits best for them. This isn't some way of slyly trying to say "hey, *we're* really the best for you". I really believe that everyone has different needs and they may want a different application to meet those.

That being said, we've worked very hard to make sure that OmniFocus fits a lot of different life/work styles. If there's something you'd like to see in OmniFocus, please drop by our forums: http://forums.omnigroup.com/

(As an aside it is possible to use as either a GTD app or a non-GTD app and I'll be posting more information and videos about this soon.)

OmniFocus has a lot of power under the hood that we'll be making use of as we continue active development of the app. While I don't want to get into specifics here, we'll keep you posted with our plans for new features as we develop them.

Come visit us at Macworld this year and either I or one of the other Omni folks will be happy to demo OmniFocus and explore how it can fit your life/workstyle.

Ethan, even though I prefer Things, I appreciate your work. A lot of these applications definitely draw some inspiration from your early work (iGTD moreso than Things) and having alternatives is always great.

I do think though that more time should have been spent at the beginning of OmniFocus' development thinking about how to make it a more general tool. It still has a very strong Kinkless flavor and a lot of those decisions seem heavily "baked in" to the interface and how the program works at this point. A lot of OmniFocus feels pretty ad-hoc, like it has evolved by having bits duct-taped on rather than being thought out cleanly from the beginning... "singletons" being the best example of this, but you just have to look at the changelists every time a new version comes out to see that small ad-hoc behaviors are being changed quite frequently.

Maybe I have high standards, but I am very familiar with the old Windows task manager Ecco, which used a very simple, fully orthogonal data model but allowed for all the functionality of OmniFocus. Things has that kind of clean architecture. It has a data model that's at once simple, powerful, and fully orthogonal.

Your claim that it's possible to use OmniFocus as a non-GTD tool is true, but only painfully. For instance it is impossible to turn off the contexts column, impossible to turn off having the context dumped to iCal when syncing with iCal, impossible to turn off "next actions", etc. In a way this is kind of unfortunate, as OmniFocus could make a great hierarchical task manager in its own right, with a nice date engine (start, end dates, recurring tasks). There's no need for all the GTD baggage for those who don't want it.

I do commend you for having the best recurring task engine of any OS X app right now, but it still isn't perfect. There is no way, for instance, to make a task (e.g. a rent payment) recur on the last day of every month.