From a blog post in the iGTD website I heard today that Bargiel, the Polish developer of iGTD, is planning to go commercial with a professional version of iGTD. The current development model of iGTD is donationware.

Well, this is something very predictible, and also very natural. We all have to make a living, in the first place, and if we do contribute a great deal of value through our actions, like giving a great software to the community, then it’s normal to receive something back, in terms of financial value. The core differences between the current version of iGTD and the professional version will be related to multi-user functionalities. There were some hints in the interface (have you noticed the “Delegated” status for an action? I guess it was inactive for a reasson, much more like a hint or a promise) and also some normal strategical thinking: if it’s something that you use for your own personal productivity then you’ll make a donation, if you want, but if you plan to use iGTD on a team, share tasks, contexts and projects (these are some of the goodies in the Pro version) then it is supposed that you will make some money out of it, and you can pay the fee to the developer. So, once again, this is not surprising at all. The only thing that I expect now, it’s the new application. I’m highly curious about it.

And the main reason for that is Omni Focus. I tested it pretty often in the last few days, and as far as I saw on the Omni blog, I’m not the only one . I must say that they are taking it very seriously, there were some days with two or three builds and tons of bug fixes. It starts to look like a pretty decent application to me. Even if it will costs money, the balance is favorable to Omni Focus. Why? Because I already have two of their applications: Omni Plan and Omni Outliner Pro, and if Omni Focus will integrate with them, then it will be a logical decision. And if I will use Omni Focus for my business, it makes little sense to continue to use iGTD just for personal user, I will end up with a ton of duplicated data.

This is why I am so curious about the Pro version of iGTD. Because, despite the quality of the Omni products (which I will continue to use) having a really slim application, fast and fat free, for managing my tasks at the office and at home, will be a big plus. And maybe a really hard decisions for me…

I am really happy to see the speed and the level of professionalism in the GTD world. It is expectable to see that for people that are obsessed with productivity, but still… I don’t see any other sector of the digital apps where the speed of development is near close to the GTD race (and I haven’t spoked yet about the second version of ThinkingRock, the java-based surprise that may come from Australia…)

Tags: getting things done, iGTD, omnifocus, Productivity & Effectiveness, reviews, software