OmniFocus is taking shape

Omni Group has just released a first screencast that demonstrates a number of features of their upcoming Getting things done (GTD) application OmniFocus.

There has been a lot of interest in OmniFocus since Omni announced last year that they are teaming up with Ethan Schoonover (the author of the popular OmniOutliner-based Kinkless GTD (kGTD) application) to build a dedicated GTD application. Omni is well known for their quality software that support the user in getting his work done by providing intuitive user interfaces and carefully preventing feature overload. Instead of silently working on a GTD app, Omni has chosen to feed the hype and occasionally blog about the upcoming OmniFocus application, without revealing anything relevant for more about 9 months. Thus, I admit that my expectations on Omni Focus are pretty high.

This first public presentation of OmniFocus leaves me with ambivalent feelings:

  • I'm not very impressed by the choice of features that have been demonstrated. I simply take it for granted for a OS X GTD application that labels are synchronized between project and context view, that undo works and that you can move tasks with drag-and-drop. The main practical advantage over kGTD seems to be a good support for filtering tasks and contexts based predefined criteria.

  • I'm puzzled by the fact that projects and contexts are arranged in hierarchies that no tagging is used. Assigning each object to hierarchy level is sometimes very difficult. In my opinion tagging has been shown to be the better way of classifying and grouping things such as photos, music, email, etc. I'm wondering, whether OmniFocus supports tags in some way and why not if it doesn't.

  • In the current state OmniFocus looks to me like a slimmed version of OmniOutliner with column filters added. I also suppose that the application is faster and more stable as kGTD. But overall, if find the current state of the application pretty disappointing given all the hype in the last month.

  • On the other hand, Omni is known to do thing right in a minimal but effective way. The most effective GTD application probably tries to stay out of your way as much as possible and support your workflow rather than imposing new constraints to your workflow.

In conclusion, it may be that OmniFocus will become a useful GTD application in future. But at the moment, I see not many compelling reason to switch from kGTD to OmniFocus.

Written May 1st, 2007