OmniFocus v Things – Mac / iPad / iPhone

Things is nice but it really and truly does feel like development there has majorly stagnated. They are providing small, incremental updates for various features, but we've been waiting on the "coming soon" push notifications support in Things for iPhone for a year now with no real changes beyond delays.

That's a lot to wade through to get to this conclusion: "There is only one way to decide which App is best for you, and that is to try both."

It's too bad Potion Factory never made the iPhone app they were talking about for The Hit List, I'm a big fan of the desktop app.

I have a strange relationship with OmniFocus. I hate thinking about using it, but when I do use it I don't mind it. The Mac version is decent, but the slow startup time of the iPhone app really destroys its utility for me.

That said, after plunking down $80 for the desktop version that I use but hate thinking about, $20 for an iPhone version I never use, I just can't bring myself to spending $40 for the iPad version without being able to figure out if I'll actually use it first (I understand this is more a criticism of the App Store rules than of OmniFocus specifically).

If you'd rather use a webapp, I've been using Nirvana (http://nirvanahq.com) -- basically Things in the browser -- pretty happily for the past couple of weeks.

I was previously a Remember The Milk-er, but was never 100% satisfied with it. Nirvana suits my organizational style much better.

I have owned and used pretty much every single GTD app on the market.

OmniFocus has been the winner for me simply due to its maturity. I use it in conjunction with org-mode for Emacs. org-mode is what I use for managing my code and computing environment. OmniFocus is bigger picture: "Call so-and-so @Phone"

I have to also drop my hat in the ring for TaskPaper. It's quite well done.

However, OmniFocus is unfortunate in the sense that you cannot export a flat file. It also is unfortunate how big of a behemoth the iPhone application is. I wish they'd include a standalone quick entry application so I don't have to load the entire database every single time I use the app.

I just want a client that works with org-mode. I have that for iPhone, but not quite for iPad or Android just yet. That's where it gets universal for me.