OmniFocus and OmniFocus for the iPhone

Once I got the iPhone, I started looking for some cool apps. Since one of the weak spots in Exchange for Mac and the horrible iCal is task lists, that was want I really wanted. I wanted to be able to find something where I could enter a task on my iPhone when it popped into my head and have it sync with my computer at some point. My old method of emailing it to myself, worked okay with the Treo, but it was inefficient, particularly since it takes longer to send an email with the iPhone.

I finally settled on OmniFocus. One reason I selected this is that it is made by the Omni Group, which also makes the very excellent OmniGraffle, which we have on all of our machines, and OmniOutliner and OmniPlan, which we have on several. OmniFocus is not supposed to be a run of the mill task manager. It is based on David Allen's "Getting Things Done". GTD is an interesting and useful system. I have read the book and agree with much of what he says, so I thought this would work well.

Unfortunately, OmniFocus is not ready for prime time. To get the system to work you have to buy both OmniFocus and OmniFocus for the iPhone. In addition you need a MobileMe (nee .Mac) account or another webDav server, so the whole setup is quite pricey. The worst part, is that to sync the iPhone version and the desktop version, you have to pay full price for what is essentially an alpha version of the software. They send updates every day, but it is a long way from being done. Getting the daily update is like playing roulette. You spins the wheel and you takes your chances. Is the update going to fix things? Or is it going to send the whole thing crashing down. Lately, crashing has come up more often than not.

I can't sync anything since an update last week. Even more unfortunate, support, which is typically very good with Omni Group products, is nonexistent. If you try to get help, you get a notice that they are very busy writing the software and may get back to you within three weeks. If you go to the forums on their site, you get dogpiled by GTD true believers who will usually say something to the effect that "working software is not GTD canonical".

I hope they get things worked out, because this has potential to be an excellent app, but it is crazy to charge full price for alpha software. I can guarantee that we will not be rolling out OmniFocus throughout the company for a while and we will start thinking hard about using less Omni Group software in the future. After all, even Microsoft waits until it has a beta version before selling it to the masses.