For those that follow me on Twitter, you may have noticed that I purchased and installed OmniFocus for iPhone over the weekend. If you are a GTD lover and a Mac user, you are no doubt familiar with the “regular” OmniFocus application from The Omni Group. I’ve been using OmniFocus for quite some time now (I wrote about that back in February), and I was really excited about the possibility of taking it mobile with me on my iPhone.
A number of things stand out after using this combination for a few days:
- I’m too cheap to pay for a MobileMe subscription, so I just setup a WebDAV site on my hosting package. It’s not the greatest in the world (I’d prefer to run WebDAV over SSL on the standard HTTPS port, for example), but it works. However, less technically inclined folks would have had a problem without a MobileMe subscription. I hear that Omni is planning on adding Bonjour syncing support, but I can’t imagine that will be anything other than Wi-Fi only.
- It takes quite a while to sync my iPhone after a day of working in OmniFocus on my MacBook Pro. This is even with a good 3G data connection. I don’t know that there’s anything that can be done about this, nor is this even anyone’s “fault”; it’s just an observation I’ve seen thus far.
- In an effort to stretch the battery out as long as possible, I generally keep Location Services turned off. This limits some of the location-aware functionality that OmniFocus for iPhone features. Since the release of the 2.1 firmware, my battery life has improved; perhaps I can turn on Location Services and not suffer too much of a battery hit. If anyone has any feedback on how much of a hit it is to keep Location Services turned on, I’d certainly appreciate it.
- I’m finding that my current set of contexts don’t necessarily translate well to the iPhone version. Currently my contexts are more for grouping similar tasks than by location or resource; I’m thinking I may need to move to more location-based contexts. I’m not yet sure how that will work or how I’ll integrate that with my workflow. Again, suggestions are more than welcome.
Overall, I’m pretty pleased with OmniFocus for iPhone. (In fact, I’m pretty pleased with my iPhone in general.) There’s always room for improvement, but given my experience with The Omni Group with applications like OmniGraffle and OmniOutliner I’m quite confident that the application will improve over time.
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Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 10:20 am
Mike DiPetrillo
I’ve been using OmniFocus on the iPhone since they launched the app. It’s been a bumpy road. I still don’t use it too heavily on the iPhone since it’s slow, crashes a lot, and syncs really slow. Also a word of caution…Several times I’ve updated a bunch of stuff in the Mac client (moved tasks around and such) then I went and hit sync on my iPhone client without first doing a sync on the Mac side and it ends up overwriting all of the changes on the Mac. Basically it’s not a sync so much as a copy everything over to the other side. This has bit me in the butt and I’ve lost stuff several times. There’s a lot of room for improvement here but it’s getting better. I came from iGTD which I LOVED but the development fizzled out over there. I tried a bunch of other things but ended up sticking with OmniFocus. Hopefully we’ll get to a nice, fast, stable iPhone client that actually does sync sometime soon.
Oh, and I have location services turned on and it works just fine with the battery. My battery lasts a full work day with 3G, GPS, Push, and location all turned on doing lots of mail, web surfing, and phone calls. Come 7 pm it needs to be plugged in though.
Tuesday, September 30, 2008 at 11:22 pm
John B. Kendrick
Before you make the commitment, you might want to try some web-based GTD apps. I’ve written about the GTD apps I use on my Mac, Windows at work and on my iPhone (original and 3G) on my blog at http://johnkendrickonline.com
As a bonus, the post I just published speaks to the use of contexts, which you might find of interest. John
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 2:26 am
Dan
For implementing GTD you can use this web-based application:
http://www.Gtdagenda.com
You can use it to manage your goals, projects and tasks, set next actions and contexts, use checklists, schedules and a calendar.
A mobile version and iCal are available too.
Wednesday, October 1, 2008 at 6:43 pm
Kirk
I’m trying to embrace the GTD philosophy (reading the GTD book is high on my GTD list! LOL), and installed Things on both my Mac and iPhone. Seems pretty decent at a much lower price point than OmniFocus.
As for location services, I’m finding that disabling 3G saves the most battery power. I don’t really need the speed for much of what I do on the iPhone, and if I’m doing some heavy surfing, I can enable it as needed.
I also found a great (and reasonable) external battery pack thingy (tech term) that I’m pretty happy with. It’s the Lenmar Universal Powerport kit, and it was $35 from Amazon. Provides about two full iPhone charges before it needs recharging.