The OmniGroup has announced the public beta of OmniFocus, its much talked-about “Getting Things Done” (GTD) app.

In short, it looks good. The press release promises that OmniFocus will help “you work smarter by giving you powerful tools for staying on track of all the things you need to do.” And it lives up to its promise, even in beta form.

GTD Old-timers will immediately recognise OmniFocus’s roots in KinklessGTD , Ethan Schoonover’s collection of applescripts for Getting Things Done with OmniGroup’s OmniOutliner. (Ethan has been a key colloborator on the project and is now OmniGroup’s Head of Marketing.)

For a while, it was the market-leader for its comprehensiveness, its Quicksilver integration and ability to sync smoothly with iCal.

These strengths are carried over into OmniFocus.

The interface has that reassuring Kinkless look:

Depending on whether it is running in Planning or Contexts mode, it lists your projects or your contexts in the lefthand-side column, and the matching content on the righthand-side.

It aims to provide “a big bucket” or comprehensive features for gathering actions or tasks that you need to get done. There’s no point having a GTD app if it can’t easily capture the totality of your tasks, however they come in or occur to you.

To this end, while Quicksilver provided much of the gathering grunt in Kinkless, OminFocus has its own, built-in, system-wide Quick entry tool, with a keyboard shortcut that can be customised in the app’s Preferences:

It also offers a clipping service, that is the ability to clip information from apps like Safari, NetNewsWire and Mail.app when creating a task:

It will even copy across the MailTags project for a clipping if a matching one exists in OmniFocus.

Tabbing across the name of the task, the project, the context and the due date is quick and easy. It even knows that tomorrow is Monday, 19 November. (UPDATE: In order to see the Due Date field in the Quick Entry pane, you will need first to Check the View > Columns > Due Date option in OmniFocus.)

It is also possible to email tasks to yourself, using the Mail rule that OmniFocus installs for you, which automatically shunts any email with a subject line starting with “– ” (or whatever you set in the preferences) into its Inbox for processing later, then archiving the email into the folder you choose.

The collecting process has been carefully thought through, and it shows. Nice.

Processing tasks, sorting them into projects and the contexts in which they can be done, is done in the app’s Inbox. It’s all tab-friendly and it’s smart — auto-matching of existing projects and contexts and smart parsing of dates makes the processing quick and consistent.

Syncing with iCal is even smarter than I remember it in Kinkless. OmniFocus now allows you to decide which iCal calendar to use for which contexts, reducing the clutter in iCal and making for better “synergy” between my Omnifocus office context and iCal work calendar:

And of course it makes use of the new Leopard Mail.app-iCal to-do syncing, which brings OmniFocus to-dos through into Mail.app’s to-do list, each one optionally prefixed with its Omnifocus context:

Thanks to the magic of iPhone, I then have my to-dos with me wherever I go (although not the clipped information which is unhelpfully wrapped up in a mime attachment).

(UPDATE: There is a trick here though. By default, to-dos piped into Mail.app are stored in the “On My Mac” to-do folder. It’s a pain, but you can drag them into the to-do mailbox of an account that your iPhone checks. Obviously, it would be better if this was automated but I don’t think that you can apply rules to to-dos.)

Still, if you take care in writing the names of your to-dos, the iPhone will even highlight the phone number of the person you need to call:

Unfortunately, my iPhone can’t take a photo of itself. Apologies for the quality.

I am liking this app very much, much better than other GTD solutions for Mac users. I took advantage of the special pre-release offer about fifteen minutes after installing the beta.

OmniFocus is available for a limited time at the pre-release price of USD 39.95 (and 25% cheaper than that for people who have a OmniOutliner 3.0 licence. So, it only cost me USD 29.95).

When released on 8 January it will sell for USD 79.95. Expensive, you say? You’re right. Good value, you ask? It depends what your time is worth.

You can also watch Ethan showing off OmniFocus at length in a new fifteen minute video tour or download the “At-a-glance” Quick Reference Chart. Links on OmniGroup’s OmniFocus web page .omnifocus, gtd, getting things done, mail.app, apple mail, ical, productivity, kinkless, iphone, sweet as a nut

Rory Bowman is taking to Leopard Mail with a passion. He has written up some pointers on “Getting Things Done” (GTD) with Mail’s new notes and to-do features.

He presents a sample screenshot using a note to list things that need to be done, talks about using Leopard Mail’s RSS feature to speed up the time you spend reading the web and what smart mailboxes are good for.

Unfortunately, my notes don’t sync to my iPhone as he suggests.

It’s not really a systematic attempt to implement GTD in Leopard Mail, but it is an interesting summary of the productivity-boosting features in Leopard Mail.

Myself, I am reluctant to incorporate the new features of Leopard Mail into a tweaked workflow for getting things done.

To tell the truth, I am bit underwhelmed by the notes and to-do features, the to-dos especially. Remember the Keynote at which Steve Jobs explained in an excited voice how he “lives in Mail”? Ah-a, I thought, that means we are now going to see something really special.

But in fact the implementation of to-dos is really crude. They are there, but the flexibility to display them sensibly (hide completed, show to-dos for upcoming week, show only a particular calendar, etc, etc) is missing. Perhaps that’s why he lives in Mail; the features are too underdone to help him get his work done and live outside Mail for a while!

The old way which uses only technology already available in Tiger is good enough for me.

I am waiting for Leopard MailTags to get its to-do and event creation features back.

How about you? Has Leopard Mail changed your productivity or workflow for the better, or do you (like me) still use it as if it were Tiger Mail, just a bit more shiny? getting things done, GTD, leopard mail, apple mail, notes, to-dos, mailtags, mail.app, productiivity

A new Getting Things Done (GTD) app from Hog Bay Software brings an extreme and focussed minimalism to task management.

It doesn’t transfer data to your iPod or iPhone, or sync information with facebook, or grab an audio soundbite from iTunes for each project, or have fifteen user-customisable icons for each context. It just does lists, projects, tasks and contexts. And it does them very well.

The interface is simple:

Simple keyboard shortcuts start a new project or task. Contexts (or what the app calls ‘tags’) with @ prepended are stored and can be set to autocomplete on future tasks.

Tasks for each context across a variety of projects are easily and cleanly displayed by selecting the context from a drop down list:

Completed tasks can be archived, which shifts them down to the bottom of the document and removes from the project and context-specific display.

If I had time to maintain a GTD life outside Mail.app, I would use something like this. There is no opportunity to waste time tweaking endless options which are peripheral to achieving the task management that these apps are designed to provide. Although there are plenty of other GTD apps for Mac users (see an earlier Hawk Wings post or Ed Eubanks’ round-up at Low End Mac), none of them offers the forocious “Productivity Boot Camp” discipline of TaskPaper. I find that helpful.

You can get a copy of TaskPaper from the Hog Bay web site. It costs USD 18.95 although the free 14-day demo period gives you a chance to discover if this the approach that works for you.

Disclaimer: Jesse Grosjean kindly gave me free registration so that I could try this out.GTD, getting things done, productivity, not mail.app, not apple mail, task management, lists

Gina Trapani at Lifehacker has done all Gmail users an enormous favour with her Better Gmail extension for Firefox.

She has taken some of the best Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail and rolled them into a more user-friendly extension that adds (among other things): coloured labels, a mind-bending array of extra keyboard shortcuts, a fixed font option, larger attachment icons, skins and more.

It almost converted me. Almost.

Now the latest version (0.8) adds even more goodies — bottom posting for replies, Google Reader integration, fixed conversation previews, and a Mail.app skin:

Each option can be enabled or not as you like from the extension’s preferences.

Needless to say, with the labels feature and the extra keyboard shortcuts that Better Gmail provides, it is not very difficult to hack up a very efficient “Getting Things Done” (GTD) system, which doesn’t have all the polish of the tailor-made GTDInbox (formerly GTDMail) extension , but not everyone needs that kind of power.

It also makes managing mailing lists the work of a new keystrokes and can filter work emails from personal emails quickly and easily.

I could go on and on.

Marriage is for life, we like to hope. Mail.app and me are forever (obviously), but — golly! — the occasional harmless flirt with Better Gmail is diverting! Try it out for yourself.gmail, mail.app, skins, email, labels, keyboard shortcuts, productivity, GTS, Getting things done, webmail, alluring

MailTags , the prince of Mail.app plugins, is becoming so wide-spread that it is now a force to reckon with for other developers as well.

Recent updates to two other apps offer better ways to integrate MailTags data.

The latest version of up-and-coming “Getting Things Done” app iGTD imports MailTags tags along with emails when you use the app’s F5 hotkey.

DockStar 2.0.2 (Hawk Wings Review) resolves an issue in showing mail counts for smart mailboxes based on MailTags. Now, you can make a “@followup” smart mailbox based on your keywords and set Dockstar to show the total number of messages in this mailbox as a separate badge on the Mail icon. mail,.app, apple mail, mailtags, tags, integration, getting things done, gtd, productivity, dockstar

Actiontastic, one of the nicest Desktop GTD apps for Mac users, has gone open source, soon after gaining support for MailTags.

Jon Crosby announced the shift to a free, open source future for Actiontastic in a post on his blog a few days ago:

Opening up this project for community participation is the best possible thing that I can think of doing for its future. Great things are on the horizon for that sweet intersection of the web and the desktop. I would rather discuss them openly and collaborate with other like-minded people than hide any of the details just to make another $29 shareware sale.

Three weeks earlier, he explained how to integrate MailTags with Actiontastic via iCal with Actiontastic’s @inbox calendar. Nifty.

Is the move to open source a good thing? It’s the usual trade-off between free software offering the user community a chance to contribute on the one hand and, on the other, a possible loss of focus and forward movement.

The announcement of Eudora’s move to open source last year made some people nervous about its future for similar reasons.

Hopefully, both apps will continue to thrive.GTD, getting things done, mailtags, mail.app, apple mail, ical, open source, eudora, productivity

Dutch software developer Johannes Verelst has written up his system for Getting Things Done (Dave Allen’s task management philosophy) with Mail.app and iCal.

(If you are mystified about endless references to “Getting Things Done” (or GTD), Merlin Mann’s 43 Folders is still the best way to lift the fog. See his recent “Getting Things Done: Recap for ’07″ post for a list of red-hot how-tos and tutorials on boiling GTD down to something workable for you, or jump right into his “Getting started with GTD.” )

Johannes’ way of using Mail.app to get things done is not like my own Mail.app GTD system which makes it all the more interesting and useful to read. There is always something to learn from people who do things differently.

I make an effort to keep everything in Mail, which then acts as my “Bucket”, processing hub and also my to-do list. Less swapping from app to app helps me to focus on getting the tasks done.

Johannes likes to dump stuff out to iCal. He uses calendars to separate out his projects and contexts. A clever combination of Mail Act-on, Quicksilver and applescript helps him to create an all-encompassing system.

I use MailTags to set iCal to-dos, but only so iCal’s alarm will shoot a reminder back into my inbox about something that needs to get done. MailTags’ keywords for @Action, @Waiting and @Defer and its project tags give me enough power and control to manage a confusion of Real Life, blogging, freelancing and family tasks efficiently.

While Mail remains for me what Johannes calls a “Cockpit”, he uses DoBeDo as his cockpit, managing his to-dos through the widget’s interface.

His GTD toolbox list at the end of the post shows that his system is up and running for less than USD 70 (and most of that is for the software to sync his Palm T|X). It pays for itself in a week at the outside.mail.app, apple mail, ical, Getting Things Done, GTD, productivity, task management, mailtags, mail act-on, plugins