iGTD goes commercial, Omni Focus goes pretty well

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…)

First OmniFocus screenshot

Well, it seems that finally we can see what’s behind the guys at Omni Group. It’s about the hiper-hyped OmniFocus GTD-enabled software announced several months ago, we finally have a face. They posted a first screen-shot, and from what I saw it looks pretty interesting. I am a public fan of their products – OmniPlan proved to be an incredibly valuable resource for my company project plannning so far – and I constantly use their OmniOutliner for quick sketches or fast annotating documents.

This is the original screenshot of what they offer – of course, all the credits and copyrights goes to them – so far…

What we may expect in the first – still unknown release date – version of OmniFocus:

• Quick entry panel, accessible via keyboard shortcut from any application
• Import for kGTD documents
• Focus feature for opening a specific folder or project in its own window
• Project or context work views, both with extensive filtering and sorting options
• iCal synchronization (enabling you to get to Palm and other devices)
• Printing support that will include printing to index cards
• Project outlines include hierarchical tasks and task groups
• Pop-up calendars for assigning start, due and completion dates
• Project and task filtering by project state, dates, next actions, available actions and more
• Rich text support for project and task notes
• Ability to attach files to any task or project

A part of the more orthodox GTD-centric approach, iGTD does already all of this. And the latest version, (1.3.5 at the date of this article) offers .Mac integration and MailTags integration. Wow, we do live interesting times. I am already impatient to see more of the OmniFocus, signed on they beta tester list, and hope to get my hands on fresh, beta realease ASAP .

iGTD! Do you?

Well, it’s been some time since I’ve got used to my ThinkingRock gtd helper. For those of you not so into GTD stuff, ThinkingRock is a java-based organizer application that closely follows the David Allen’s Getting Things Done Methodology. I think I’m at or around six months of daily usage. My list of future items and information items – the ThinkingRock way of calling “Someday/Maybe” items – has reached a point where it is almost usable. It’s a part of my recent history, of my intentions, goals, ideas and sketches that crossed my mind in the last half of year.

It’s so interesting to go through this in my daily or weekly reviews. I get a lot of fresh insights from myself. One of those insights was related to a blog post I saw several days ago at the TUAW guys. Didn’t had the time to read and marked it as a “future item”. And in one of my reviews, I decided to go over it. It was about “yet another GTD application”, called iGTD. I remembered I saw the name sometime at the end of last year in some forums, and I think it was a post about “how would you like to use an application called iGTD?”. Out of curiosity, I visited the page, and ops!

Yes, that’s the word, ups! It was so interesting that I haven’t even tried to make the connection with what I remembered, so at this point I really don’t know if this iGTD is the same application with the one that got shaped last year in those forums, but I don’t really care either.

iGTD is a full Cocoa application and is one of the best pieces of organizing – and GTD compliant – software I saw so far. It’s not bloated, nor shiny, nor simple or mean and lean. It just do the trick of boosting yourself and it’s also discrete enough to not get in your way of actually doing stuff.

I will write a full review next week, but until then, here’s a little sneak peak of what iGTD knows:

• syncing with iCal (and in the last version recursivity for tasks)
• Quicksilver and iBackup powerful integration (with it’s own plugin)
• Mac OS menubar integration
• AddressBook integration: search contacts from within iGTD with autocompletion
• configurable autosaving of data
• url’s integration into projects
• context, projects, “someday/maybe” and “waiting for” functionality
• task searching by keyword
• a plethora of keyboards strokes that makes your processing activity much easier
• tagging of projects (you know, like technorati tags) and, based on this, “smart folders” of tagged tasks
• a really cleand and light good look
• a donationware strategy

As of April 5th, the latest version is 1.3.2 and I already have more than a week of using both ThinkingRock and iGTD. I must say I’m impressed by iGTD. Have you had your iGTD experiences with this? I would be interested in some feedback…