Awesome

OmniFocus Your Life

By EAN ⋅ January 8, 2008 ⋅  Email this Post ⋅  Print this Post ⋅ Post a Comment

Developers: The Omni Group
Version: 1.0
Price: $79.95 (Standard) // $49.95 (Educational)
Operating System: Mac OS X
Download OmniFocus

The Omni Group have been purveyors of fine software for OS X for years. Who’d have thought that you could actually get people to pay for a web browser? Business practices aside, today they released a brand new, if not boringly named, Getting Things Done program, OmniFocus. Don’t let the company’s obsession with the word “Omni” dissuade you–this one fantastic piece of software.

I’m starting to think that developers are having a competition to see how many GTD programs they can make for the Mac. There are dozens to choose from, so anyone who wants to enter the life organization arena really has to bring their best game forward. And The Omni Group have obviously pulled out all the stops with their well crafted contestant. This is the kind of program that makes me glad I’m an Apple user. OmniFocus is a case study in usability and design. It’s practically perfect. Except the price. But more on that later.

So what makes OmniFocus so good? Let’s start with the interface. OmniFocus is exactly what an OS X program should be. Streamlined and snazzy. You can tell the designers obviously took some time developing the look and feel of this program, as nearly everything is laid out where it should be. And if you happen to hate the default layout, you can customize it easily much like you can in nearly any other Mac program. Even the use of purple (lavender?), a color that I’m not too fond of, is used tastefully enough. I wish I could change it to a nice shade of blue, though.

While OmniFocus’ interface is impressive, the usability is where this program really shines. There are few programs I come across that feel completely intuitive–and OmniFocus is one of those programs. To help new users get acclimated to the GTD lifestyle, The Omni Group provides a few tasks to help you learn more about Getting Things Done and they even feature a nice video and Quick Reference PDF file to help their customers get up to speed with their program. The video was somewhat helpful, but I found the PDF file to be more of an asset.

Easily the strongest point of OmniFocus is the ease at which it can interact with the rest of your programs. The integration list isn’t quite as long as other OS X GTD programs, like iGTD [review], but The Omni Group fully integrates with the programs you want–almost as though OmniFocus was included with every brand new Mac. Through such thorough integration, users can search for entries with Spotlight, clip tasks in Mail with the cleverly named Mail Clip-O-Tron 3000, and synchronize tasks to iCal. It all works seamlessly and flawlessly.

Another feature that I found was absolutely indispensable was Quick Entry. Just press a user defined keyboard shortcut and up pops a box you can use to enter in a new task. While I’d love to see the Quick Entry window explode onto the screen with the panache of Quicksilver [review], just popping up is enough to get the job done.

Overall, I found that OmniFocus is a really great program–but it’s not without its faults. A more comprehensive program integration list would be great, I’d love to see some Growl notifications, more customization options are always welcome, and I’d like to have a bit more flexibility. Yes, this is a GTD program, but the option to break out of David Allen’s mold from time to time should be there. And then there’s the price. Forking over $80 for this program is ridiculous. I absolutely adore this program, but it’s not worth it at the current price. Even the academic discount is pretty steep. But then again, OmniFocus is made by the same company who wants you to pay for a web browser.