When it comes to text editing, I got got by the Emacs bug practically from day one. The idea of an editor where practically everything was coded in macros, and could be changed in almost any way was very attractive. The Emacs I started with was a monster for the Vax 11/780 that the CS department had, and there often were complaints about the amount of resources it hogged, which in 1984 were considered to be quite exceptional.

As a consequence I never learned Vi. Often I regretted it, when remotely connected to some Unix or Linux system that didn’t have Emacs installed. A couple of weeks ago I read Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?. I sort of knew a reason why I should – it’s everywhere, unlike Emacs.

So, time to bite the bullet. I have installed gVim on my Windows working platform, MacVim on the Mac development platform and ViEmu into Visual Studio and have been forcing myself to learn as much as possible. It IS a steep learning curve indeed, but I was very, very surprised. Almost everything I use in Emacs on a day to day basis is in Vim, and quite a bit of it is quicker and easier to use than Emacs – it’s just that so much of the power is hidden from immediate view.

I’m glad I took the time to learn, as I think I’ll be sticking with it, and I know I’ll have a text editor waiting for me no matter which machine I use.

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.

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.

After being pleasantly surprised with the very easy setup of iSync with my Bluetooth phone and iCal/Address Book/iGTD, and then discovering how mind-numbingly easy it was to transfer photos between my phone and the Mac, I never realised there was another piece of subtle phone/Bluetooth integration sitting there waiting to leap.

You can use Address Book to send an SMS. In fact, it receives SMS’s too, and can store them as notes against the associated contact, dial numbers and log received calls. If I’d only realised that I needed to click on the bluetooth icon on Address Books toolbar, too subtle for me!

In moving to the Mac, some of my software has had to change since the publishers of the Windows software have not seen the light and seen fit to release Mac versions (shame on them). So, over the next few days I will be doing some mini-reviews comparing:

1. ThinkingRock vs iGTD for GTD empowered to-do list tracking (TR is Mac enabled, but being Java, I needed to look for alternatives)
2. MS Money vs MoneyDance (what was that about Java?)
3. QuickSilver vs AutoHotkey’s 320mph script.

There is now only one piece of software that I use regularly that I haven’t a Mac version of, and that is not enough for me to invest in Windows emulation or dual-booting the Mac. Unfortunately that is my old favourite DietPower.

Despite gaining proficiency with a track-pad as an alternative to a real mouse, I missed the mouse-wheel. This little innovation makes scrolling through documents a breeze, and I often plugged a mouse into my laptop to get the functionality.

Of course, the Mac has a solution. The track-pad of a Mac Book an detect two fingers at the same time, and if you hold one finger still while sliding the other then it acts like a mouse wheel – easy peesy scrolling back. Another bonus is that it’s vertical and horizontal scrolling, so it’s even better than a mouse wheel. Cool.

When I stumbled across this I did a bit of digging, and found another little utility – hold down the CTRL key at the same time and the display zooms in and out around the mouse, handy for checking out fine detail or when the eyes are getting a little tired.

This mornings potential annoyance was realising that after tidying up my 100’s of addresses that my phone was out of date, MacBook was closed, I was in a rush to leave but needed to ensure that my phones contacts were correct. Sweet! The MacBook proved itself again.

Open the lid, it was on, instantly. “Cmd-Space-i-s-Enter” and QuickSilver had iSync running, Sync button, a couple of seconds later BEEP from my Nokia, slam down the lid and off I went – total time, less than 10 seconds.

My old D800 would have taken a minimum of a couple of minutes, plus the sync probably wouldn’t have worked until I power-cycled the phone.

Being new to the world of Mac, and newly migrated from Windows I naively went searching for an application or a set of drivers for the Nokia phone. I found quite a few pages pointing out that Nokia hadn’t released any Mac compatible software. It was looking grim.

Then, I noticed a thread talking about iSync. Still, I thought I would need to find a driver for iSync, but I started it up and within a minute had a connection via Bluetooth to my mobile phone, lots of spinning graphics, the phone went beep and all was over – and I had over 100 new contacts appear in my Address Book. Not only was it quick and painless, I have never seen such a good mapping between the phone address book fields and the computers contacts fields.

Since then I have found that to-do items also auto sync between iGTD, iCal and the phone.

Again the promise of being able to just do things without drivers comes true. Still happily dazed.