The Mac is really spoilt for quality GTD apps.

I was going to write a review of Thinking Rock versus iGTD, but a couple of things have put me off the idea. First, they are both really good applications. Second, the non-native aspects of ThinkingRock would totally skew the review against it, even though it was that very same cross-platform capability that allowed me to use it on Windows and to benefit from it’s functionality for nearly a year.

I was using ThinkingRock on Windows, it is a really excellent fit to the GTD methodology, and helped me tackle complex projects and balance work, fitness goals and home projects well. When I moved to the Mac, I had a nose around and fell over iGTD nearly straight away.

iGTD is a really cool native Cocoa application that looks like it belongs on a Mac. A lot of thought has been put into interoperability with other Mac tools. You want an action based on the email you are reading – one keypress and it is in your GTD inbox; follow up on a web page you are reading, again one keypress. Have a random though you need to capture, one keypress and type it in – no hunting for the application. These aspects alone make it a antural part of your daily activity. Syncing to iCal, .mac and my phone is just icing on the cake.

And then there is OmniFocus. Oh, how sweet you look with your simple and uncluttered UI, the smooth screencasts showing how everything flows so neatly. You make iGTD look clumsy. A pity I can’t get my hands on you though, being in a closed beta.

I am going to be torn when OmniFocus is available, since iGTD does most of what I need. But, nested contexts and nested projects are not really how I want them, the nesting doesn’t have any obvious functionality apart from navigation. Actions don’t propogate up the tree, so I end up having to open projects to check there is nothing within them that is pending. And the screencasts of OmniFocus show it working just the way I want – BUT, the interopability aspects are going to be lacking in the early releases, and I am suspicious that Omni don’t have anything like the release turnaround that Bartek demonstrates, which is phenomenal. Another point is that iGTD is going to have a pro version (chargable) whereas OmniFocus will cost from day one. How will this influence development?

Interesting times are promised as these packages fight for dominance.