The Future of OmniFocus

Chris Suave has a two part series critiquing OmniFocus and suggesting changes.

I typically despise artist renderings and mock-ups. They are disconnected from the reality of a fully integrated piece of software.

Chris acknowledges this position several times:

I really believe that. It’s so easy to be an armchair design critic; when you have nothing at stake, don’t have to worry about implementation, can ignore things that don’t fit into your grand design vision, you can suggest anything with impunity.

With that caveat, I think Chris is trying to re-imagine his favorite application in a way that brings back the excitement we all felt when OmniFocus first rolled out.1 He’s boiled it all down to a slideshow that describes his philosophy. I think it looks nice.

Coincidentally, Ken Case was interviewed over on SimplicityBliss.

Fortunately, unlike books, we get to update our work after it ships. So it’s important to get the fundamentals in place, to meet our goals for a release–but it’s also important to frequently ask the question “Would the world be better if we ship this software as it is today, rather than improving the software even more?” We want to make that answer be “yes” as quickly as possible, even if it means giving up on some of the things we might originally have hoped to do.

  1. I’m against the combination of target and due dates. The due and target are the same for my task manager. If I need to add buffers, I’ll move the project to a project planner like OmniPlan or even Microsoft Project. ↩︎