GTD Software Race – Close Run

There are a few good software providers that are also close followers of the GTD methodology out there.

There are some good – although pre-release, or alpha – GTD software made by those people.

The nicest thing is that every release of these software pieces come in the same wave. Once one launches a new version, days after that, if not hours, the others are keeping up the pace with updates. The last week-end was a good week-end for that.

Omnigroup lanuched OmniPlan (which I also bought and enjoyed the benefit of being a custumer). For those of you that didn’t understand my enthousiasm I must state that I was for the last 10 years a fan of the Open Source model, and only lately I started to understand the paid software model.

Inbox has come to the 1.0.3 version and keeps its slick design on top of the – most of them sketchy and only desirable – functionalities. The good thing is that Midnight Beep (the software company behind Inbox) has started a video tutorial. So far they covered only the first tow phases of the GTD methodology – and also the first two modules of their application – which relates to Collection and Processing. That might be a head run for them in front of the competition.

Actiontastic made its move and launched 0.8.3 version, which basically sync to iPod now (a feature announced several weeks ago). The blog post annoucing this is also a little rebel, and instead of bulleted lists of features it just tells a story about how the software might be used.

It’s still to early for me to write a detailed comparison of those applications. I used extensively ThinkingRock lately and I’m kinda used to it. Both Actiontastic and Inbox are Cocoa implementations, hence native Mac performance and appearance, while ThinkingRock, as portable as Java is, still lacks some good looks. OmniPlan is related to this discussion only for the hints that might whisper in relation with the long awaited OmniFocus. If Omni could link together OmniOutliner – as basic sketcher and idea dumper and collector -, OmniPlan – as a very impressive project management tool -, and OmniFocus – as a pure GTD implementation -, I think they will hit big. But so far, we only have some promises from them and some good functionalities from their competitors, all wrapped in good PR.