Toying With OmniFocus
By Scott
A week or so ago my brother mentioned that one of the Mac podcasts had done an episode about application launchers and asked if I had seen it. I hadn’t, but having a few minutes of downtime, I decided to give it a listen. Said show is called Mac Power Users, and the hosts David and Katie do a good job of comparing the big three launchers (Spotlight, Alfred, and LaunchBar). But that’s not why we are here today: At several points during the shows (they did a followup on the launcher topic on one of their proceeding shows), one or the other of the hosts pimped a piece of software called OmniFocus.
OmniFocus (OF) is a glorified ToDo list application which allows one to store and work with tasks according to David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) methodology. And since I have been (more-or-less) using that methodology for 10+ years now, when OF is mentioned, my attention is piqued (basically, I’m looking for a good excuse to purchase it).
I’ve know about OmniFocus for years, yet I’ve never tried it as it has an overly high (to me) cost of entry at $80.00 for the Mac/IOS installs. Regardless, all their pandering ebullience brought me to the point where I thought I would try it at least.
So I downloaded the fourteen (14) day trial, and while I’ll reserve my final opinion on the product until the end of that trial, I have entered a bit of data. Yesterday, I added two simple tasks to the Inbox, and since they claim to be “rather smart about guessing what you mean” [1] I told the program that each item was due “tomorrow”. The app seemed to have understood what I meant as it capitalized the word Tomorrow and when the task is viewed in the Inspect view, it has the correct dates (see image).
Yeah, but… This morning, when I sat down to check my email and to see what exciting things OF had in store for me, I found that those same tasks are still Due Tomorrow. Hmmm, not so good. Now I’m not sure when OF thinks tomorrow begins, but as it was 0615 and the sun was officially rising, I was pretty certain that, at least in the case of these two tasks, tomorrow was today, or should have been. Furthermore, I did notice that the day count on my trial had decremented by one at some point overnight, and I also saw that the app was synching with their web service as expected, so it appears that whatever internal timers handle such things were functioning properly.
So that just leaves the question: When does Tomorrow become Today in OmniFocus?
