I have been using the sneaky peak preview releases for a few weeks now, and WOW. Although you can quite quickly feel the pre-beta status with certain types of glitches, the program has been stable enough (for me) to use to organise my work and home actions. I have also been diligently reporting any issues to the “support ninjas” who have been very helpful in their replies.

I know that I have found my GTD support software now, the rocky road of discovery has finally come to the end. Along the way, I have tried ThinkingRock, iGTD, GTDGMail (now GTDInbox), Tracks, NextAction and MLO. Quite a list. But, nothing else was in quite the same league.

The closest, and best second place was iGTD. iGTD does have the advantages of being free, available now, and being production quality (nowadays, anyway). The author used the “release quickly and frequently” approach, whereas Omni are trying to get an established and robust feature set together before the first public release. Each approach has its advantages and disadvantages, but most established companies tend to go with Omni’s way. The bad thing about the “release when ready” approach is when a reasonably competent competitor is out there soaking up your potential customer – which I feel is happening with iGTD.

So how does OmniFocus beat iGTD in my world? I have been wrestling with this question for a couple of weeks, holding off writing this entry since there are few concrete points.

The main issue is the cleanliness of the user interface. OmniFocus is very free flowing, entering and editing data are not too dissimilar to just editing a text document with outdent and indent functionality. You don’t have to open a form to edit details, or double click fields to put them in edit mode, you can type in multiple tasks just by rattling them in and pressing enter after each line, simple, quick and intuitive.

A second point is that it uses a database to store the tasks, so the scalability and stability seems (to me) to be inherently more assured than an XML document that continually grows and needs writing out in its entirety every time anything is edited.

And another, critical point, is the handling of sub-projects. OmniFocus handles them much more intuitively where the next action with a project ripples down to sub-projects as they come up, so a project with sub-projects becomes a continuous task flow of its own. iGTD treats sub-projects as projects in their own right, so you can end up with multiple next-actions within one project.

A final point, though, is that with iGTD is releasing so frequently, any of these issues could have been dealt with in the last few weeks, and I may by woefully out of date – but I’m not going back – I’m happy where I am now.