pc

Windows alternatives to OmniFocus

Posted by

1

Pity me. I go around doing workshops about being a productive writer and I've even written a book about it (The Blank Screen: Productivity for Creative Writers, UK edition, US edition) And it all makes sense, it all works – I promise you that and I have such gorgeous tweets and emails from people telling me so – but there is a big problem. It's the To Do list.

When I started this, the problem was that I'm on a Mac and quite a few people go for that there Windows thing. And my To Do manager of choice only runs on Macs. Actually, I say it's the To Do manager of my choice, I think it's more the To Do manager of my heart and soul. It used to be that in a workshop I would put up a slide showing you OmniFocus and where to get it. And then I'd say: “If you know a Windows equivalent, it would be a huge help for me to hear about it.” Or something like that.

But there are two problems now: I can't automatically and easily evangelise OmniFocus because the app is in a bit of a flux as new versions are coming.

OmniFocus for iPhone has already been radically updated and I like it a lot. OmniFocus for iPad hasn't and won't be until OmniFocus 2 for Mac is done. Do you buy now or wait? It's easy with the iPhone version: buy it. It's sort-of easy with the Mac one: buy the current OmniFocus 1 for Mac and you'll get version 2 for free when it's released. But OmniFocus 1 for Mac is hard work. I understand it now and I adore the power, but it took me a long time to get there. Even last year's failed OmniFocus 2 beta was a significant improvement in some key areas so surely OF 2 will be too. So I'd wait for OmniFocus 2.

When you buy any Mac version of OmniFocus, do it from the main Omni Group website itself, don't go through the Mac App Store. As handy as that is, there are problems upgrading for free when you have bought via the App Store.

You have no choice with the iPad and iPhone ones and that's also why I hesitate: the iPad one is already the best of the three, can they actually make it any better? Very likely.

But here's the thing. I have all three versions of OmniFocus and I use them all. But when OmniFocus 2 for iPad or Mac comes out, I'm buying them again immediately.

Because I truly don't know of any other To Do software that is this good.

I ask about that and about Windows and so far so far nobody has ever piped up with an answer during the workshop, during the after-session nattering (possibly my favourite part) or over the many emails I get later.

That's not a scientific or statistically valid sampling of people to call from. For the most part, I don't presume any computer knowledge and I don't ask anyone in advance what equipment they prefer to use. But most festival or university blurbs that describe my talk use one of the many texts I give them and they they invariably include the phrase “make your computer work harder for you”. If you were deeply into Windows software already, or Mac for that matter, I don't think that line would sell the workshop to you. So very broadly, I think one can expect fewer than average power-users in a typical workshop. Which means we can equally expect fewer people to know Windows software well enough to tell me what they've got that is as powerful as OmniFocus.

I know I'm right in all this but I want to tell you that I doubt it matters. I doubt that there is actually an equivalent to OmniFocus in Windows. But telling you that now, six years into this post, feels a bit rich. So let me show you what I've been working on for the workshop I'm doing next week. This is a special limited-number workshop for a specific group of writers that I work with on Writing West Midlands' Room 204 programme. I know them so I have an idea of how they like to work and what kit they use. Many are PC fans and I will ask them for advice but I think it's time I stepped up.

So I've been looking into this in detail. Or at least as much detail as you can without owning a Windows PC. I've checked reviews, I've tried all the online web versions I can find and I've downloaded iOS companion apps. No Android, I don't have the facility to test that nor the patience of Job to go through all the Android permutations.

There is nothing in Windows that is as strong as OmniFocus for Macintosh.

However.

I've boiled it down to a few that have one of the core things of OmniFocus: the start date. Let's just take a second to think about that term and what we'd use it for. If I enter a new task in OmniFocus then I can, if I'm fussed, also give it a deadline date. An end date. If I want to, though, I can also stepm in and add what's now called a Defer Until date. In my head it's still a Start Date. But whatever you call it, OmniFocus uses it and uses it for this one specific purpose: to hide it from you.

It's little short of disturbing. You enter a task, tap in a start date and you're sure you've saved it, you're sure, but you cannot see it anywhere.

That's not entirely true. You can see it whenever you do a review of all your tasks. (Reviews are a big part of Getting Things Done, the ideas behind many successful To Do apps like OmniFocus and yet, weirdly, not many systems include it. Note, too, that the iPhone version of OmniFocus hasn't got reviews either. I truly don't understand why and I think it's a big gap. I'm okay because I just do my reviews on the iPad, where it is a gorgeous system. I do think once you start on OmniFocus you'll buy all three versions, but again, they're in flux. I don't know what to suggest.) There are other ways to find and see this new task but the kicker is that you don't get to see it on your main To Do List. It ain't there. At all.

It isn't there on your list and it isn't going to be there until that start date comes around.

Here's a typical, practical use for that. I'm doing The Blank Screen workshop at the Stratford Literary Festival in May. I've done everything I need to do to get that going, now I don't even have to think about it until mid-April when I'll update and rewrite the presentation. So get it off my list until April. I don't want to see it and I don't want to have to keep thinking “Is it April yet?” (Tell me I'm not the only person who would have to stop to think that.)

Typical, practical and shorter example: if I'm doing a particular job every week on a Tuesday, keep things off my list until the Monday when I need to think about them.

I could talk to you all day about OmniFocus and it would just be cruel if you're on a PC. But if we just and only talk about start dates, then we've got some options here. The following are all Windows apps with web versions that work crossplatform: if there's one you fancy, see whether it has a companion app that works with your phone.

Toodledo
By default, there are no start dates. But go to Account Settings and look for the many fields you can choose to switch on for a task. One of them is start dates and once you've ticked that, every task you enter has the option for a start date.

Appigo To Do
I was a big Appigo To Do user until I found OmniFocus. Since then it's become a little suite of programs including a web client and I'm honestly a little confused over what option gets you what. But as of a few months ago, Appigo To Do includes Start Dates.

It's rather poorly done on the iPhone version: you have no way to realise that this icon is for setting the end date and that one is for setting the start date. None. Do what I did: press everything. When you know which button it is, though, you're set.

Well, nearly. Appigo doesn't have the same control as OmniFocus so it's a touch less refined in what does and doesn't show you. But a task with a start date that isn't today will get separated from more urgent tasks on your list.

Asana
This is team-wide To Do management and that would put it outside my usual sphere of interest: I want to make you, personally and specifically you, more productive. Not companies. I reckon if everyone in a firm is as good as you then that's great, but it's you I'm working with.

It also tends to mean complex. Enterprise-wide software takes some learning and I haven't done that. But Asana promises start dates. It's even an automatic thing. Yet I couldn't figure it out.

There's a line somewhere between To Do apps and Project Management software. I think it might be here.

I'm disappointed that there are no start dates in the best-named To Do software ever: Remember the Milk. Going by the chatter on its support forums, there never will be either. So I'm afraid that means RTM is out for me.

They all are, I suppose: I've said before that you'd need Primacord explosive around my waist to get me away from OmniFocus on a Mac, iPhone and iPad. But there is Primacord, it is possible and I thought – I still think – that it will happen that some day there's going to be a better To Do manager. But it isn't today and it unquestionably isn't on a PC.

Me and NYT on Microsoft Word vs Apple Pages

Posted by

0

Last Friday, I went to open a Microsoft Word document someone had sent me and found that I didn't have Word on my machine. It was a true shock: I've had Word on everything since the 1980s when I began writing about word processors in various computer magazines.

What's more, I realised why I didn't have it. When I'd installed OS X Mavericks on my MacBook Pro it had found some problems with the hard disc. Serious, creaking, get out fast problems. So I had it reformat the whole drive and sort things out. I'd backed up everything, I backed it all up again just in case, fine. But apparently I hadn't remembered to put Word back on afterwards.

And here was the reason that the shock was the slap it was: it must be a month, it could be six weeks since I installed OS X Mavericks. So I'd not needed Word in all that time, not needed it or wanted it or assumed I should use it, for at least a month.

What's more, I looked at this document and it was open. My MacBook had seen that I'd didn't have Word and so it had just opened the document in the word processor I did have, Apple's own Pages. I now had the choice of schlepping off to find my Word installer or just getting on with my work so I just got on with my work.

Now, this was one Word document in a project that had involved slightly over fifty of them and I'd done the giant part of the work on my iMac which does have Word and I did use Word. This was just one last document that came through late and I was going to have to send it back as Word; if there had been all fifty left to do this way, I'd have installed Word. I think. But for one job, I just accepted that there would be a final convert-to-Word step when I was done.

I like Pages. I've always liked it. I was on a bus when I got the idea for writing a book about productivity for writers and I wrote the first thousand words of it right there on my iPad in Pages. Perhaps because I'd started it there, I carried on. There was also the fact that mentally I was associating my iMac with the 150,000-word book I was writing about Blake's 7 and I was associating my MacBook with a Doctor Who audio script that was due at the same time. But whatever my psychological reasoning, it was still that I'd pick up the iPad to carry on writing The Blank Screen and that meant it was still the case that I'd write it in Pages.

At that stage, the project was chiefly about getting the ideas down and exploring how to convey it. I later moved all the text to Word to send to my proofreaders, I then moved it to Apple's iBooks Author to do one version. I moved it all to Adobe InDesign to make the paperback and the Kindle versions. But for bashing in the words, Pages on my iPad was perfect. The best word processor is the one you've got now but Pages did that Apple thing of staying out of my way while I concentrated on my writing.

So I did go from liking it to being quite the fan and I was aware of this. I didn't notice that it had supplanted Word on my MacBook. I'm trying to think how much else I must have written in Pages on that machine without thinking about it. Certainly a few radio reviews for Radio Times magazine. Definitely several invoices. Must be a lot, but I just can't remember the word processor I used for what.

All of which is nice for me and I could just recommend Pages to you in the certain knowledge that you already have a word processor and have no need to move to a new one.

But Pages just went through a big change. It became free for new users, for one thing. I've said before that I find the free Google Docs a bit clunky and ugly yet I like it more every time I see that price. I do wonder at the decision to make it free: it's obviously very nice for new users and I've no problem with the fact that I bought my copies because I've had a huge amount of use out of it. Yet if you make something free, you do devalue it.

I remember a friend complaining that Word, at the time, cost several hundred pounds and saying why on a Earth would it? “It's only a word processor!” I suggested that she try making one and she'd then see what an enormous job it was. She didn't appreciate the brilliance of the work that had gone in to just a word processor that cost hundreds of pounds. She didn't believe me when I reported that Microsoft had up to then spent a billion dollars developing it. (True.) How much less would she now regard a free word processor?

Curiously, the word free gets people buying, so to speak, and I'm sure it gets people devaluing the word processor, but it doesn't stop anyone bitching about problems. In this case they're right: the new, free version of Pages for Mac in particular has issues.

The key aim of Apple for this release has been to make Pages on the Mac work the same and work with the same documents as Pages on iPad and iPhone. Fine. It also has this thing now where I can send anyone a pages document and they can open it – not through conversions, not through any fiddling and actually not just opening the document either. They can open Pages. Whether they've got it or not. Whether they're on a Mac or a PC. Click on the document I send you and, if you want, you're reading and editing it in Pages in your Web browser.

Apparently it is startlingly marvellous to all of us who get what is happening and can see how hard it is to do – but, infinitely more importantly, for those who do not happen to understand all that's happening, it is just a Pages document. They have no need to tell the difference between owning Pages the application and running Pages in their browser. That is a truly remarkable accomplishment and it is how computers should be: our work is what matters first. It's also a true sea change from the Microsoft approach which makes everything just difficult enough that you appreciate and you value all the company is doing for your money.

But I say it's apparently this good because this is what I keep hearing – and I have yet to have the slightest need to use the feature myself.

And the problem many people have is that in order to get this new feature, to get the ability to work across platforms, Apple has stripped Pages down and lost key features. That's what it feels like: really it's more that they started again and haven't built it back up to all it was.

The only thing is, I've no idea what the missing features are. For me in my current work, the only thing I've hit is that it's slightly more of a pain switching on the word count. (The same cross-platform good stuff and missing features bad stuff has happened to Pages' stablemates Numbers and Keynote. I've seen the difference in Numbers and that's more annoying to me.)

Apple promises that it is bringing all this stuff back and, actually, I believe them. This is what they did with the video editing software, Final Cut Pro X. And since it's not causing me problems at the moment, it's easy for me to carry on believing them.

Plus, I like the new look and feel of Pages. I like how I get on with my writing and then if I need something, if I need some tool, I look up and find that tool just about exactly where you'd think it should be. Contrast that to Word where you have a thousand icons and have to hover over them all to see what they do.

When I started writing this to you, I didn't realise how much I wanted to say. I'd found an interesting article in the New York Times that compared Pages and Word and I wanted you to see it. So I wrote the headline “NYT on Microsoft Word vs Apple Pages”. Having now blathered on at you at this length, I've just gone to change that headline to “Me and NYT” on it. And I'm mithered over whether that now sounds as if I wrote the Times article. Sorry for any confusion there.

And if you haven't had enough of musings about Pages vs Word, do take a look at the NYT article: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/28/technology/personaltech/pages-scores-technical-knockout-over-word.html?_r=0

 

Reeder 2.1 now out

Posted by

1

You can argue whether this is screamingly productive of me or not, but I use Reeder perhaps forty times a day. In case you don't know it, Reeder is a newsreader so when I have a moment standing by my kettle, I'll flick through headlines and read articles there. At least it's quicker than going to each of the 200-odd news sites I read. And definitely quicker than going to them and finding that nope, they don't have any new news since the last time I checked them three minutes ago.

There are many newsreaders: just search the App Store for the phrase 'RSS' as it's that little-used Really Simple Syndication that powers them all. RSS makes news come to us and I can't fathom why it hasn't taken over the world.

But I got into it very many years ago and have used very many RSS apps yet now it would take primacord explosive wrapped around my waist to make me stop using this particular one. Reeder is that good. It used to be even better when there was an iPhone, an iPad and a Mac version and it will be better again in the same way. Some day. Hopefully soon.

In the meantime, Reeder was updated for iOS 7 while I was away on holiday and I bought the new version immediately. You and I hadn't met on here then or I'd have rushed to enthuse about it to you. Instead, I had to tell everyone in earshot and they all looked like thank you, yes, that's really great, William, whatever makes you happy.

Now that you're here and version 2.1 has just this minute dropped on the App Store, let me enthuse about it live. Here's the only bit you really need to know, here's the App Store link: https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/reeder-2/id697846300?mt=8

But I'd also like you to know that among the myriad bug fixes and semi-demi-myriad new features, there is a particular fix I am going to enjoy. Recently when you ran Reeder in the iPhone and there was a new story with an embedded video, no power on Earth would make that play in landscape. It as solely in portrait. This was the only thing that ever made me think I preferred the previous version of Reeder. But now it's apparently fixed. At least on the iPhone it is.

I say apparently because that's how quickly I've rushed the news to you: the update dropped this minute, this moment, and as we've been speaking, the app has been updating itself on my iPhone. Off to watch some video landscape and also to go get it all for my iPad.