OmniFocus looking nice

Wow. I’ve always been a fan of the products of the Omni Group despite their premium prices. Generally speaking they are well worth it - OmniGraffle is a gem that I use just about every day.

But in the domain of getting myself better organized, I have been constantly on the lookout for a better way of doing things. TaskPaper, Simplenote, and a variety of other to do list managers have come and gone without any success in getting me to adhere to them. (On the flip side, Simplenote and Notational Velocity have taken over my basic information management workflow)

I decided to take another look at OmniFocus which I’d tried a while ago but dropped as it was too complex. But the iPhone version is sufficiently restrained and refined that I’ve been able to use it effectively for a little while now. But the real gem is the iPad version. I was in a meeting with the iPad and needed to enter a bunch of items and decided to bite the bullet and ordered it to have access to the larger iPad keyboard and discovered that it’s a whole new take on the UI, despite sharing the same iOS base. From a user experience it’s a flawless extension of an existing copy that syncs up directly (I’m using MobileMe).

In fact, it’s so good that I really wish that they would replace the OS X UI with the iPad version. The advantages of the OS X version are that it can integrate with the OS level services for system wide keyboard shortcuts, automated import based on mail messages and the like, but I find the UI less than optimal, especially when compared against the elegance of the iPad version. I find that I often do quick enter tasks on the Mac, but then switch to the iPad for actually managing the resulting tasks.

A bit pricey to buy a copy for each platform, but the integration quality really does make it worth it.