Tim Flight

Okay, well I already spilled the beans and you know the ultimate winner was OmniOutliner. Now the rest of the story.

I continued to work with the Merlin demo and just couldn’t get myself to spend over $200 for the app. It had more features than I needed. And as it turns out it still required me to do more scheduling by hand than I wanted or needed to do. Great app indeed, but it wasn’t going to make me more efficient.

I also tried an application simply called ‘Process’. It was nothing more than a series of columns with headers already filled in. Think Excel but you can’t change the column titles and it doesn’t do any calculations. Think OmniOutliner but you couldn’t control any formatting or change the columns. Nope, it won’t work for my needs.

It did, however inspire me to go back to OmniOutliner and give it another shot. Good thing too since all this time I had missed one critical piece of functionality that OmniOutliner does provide, a duration field! I was worried I wouldn’t be able to set durations less than one day, or I would be forced to use either days or hours as units. I wasn’t prepared for what I found…

OmniOutliner supports both dynamically! If I type “.5h” I get one half of an hour. If I type ‘3d’ I get one day! Setting the field to provide a summary I can quickly see how much time each of my projects will take, or look at the grand total to see how far out I need to schedule work! Amazing! With a quick setting I can specify how many hours to schedule per day and how many hours to schedule per week.

I can tell you now what I could not tell you yesterday, I have four ‘4w 5d 1.5h’ of work scheduled. Cool! I created my own field for Priority and can sort by that field whenever I would like. And perhaps the best present of all….. I created a field called due date. Then I set it up to roll those dates up into a summary and use the minimum value. Now I can see for each project what is the next deadline I need to meet, or look at the very top of the document to find when is the next deadline of all of my projects!

So there it is, the verdict is in. OmniOutliner is now my project management application of choice. Now the only decision is to decide if I want to upgrade to OmniOutliner 3 “Professional” to get added features. We shall see. And hey… OmniGroup if you are out there reading, when will the AppleScript to export to iCal be upgraded to work with version 3?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 19th, 2005 at 7:39 pm and is filed under Computer Technology. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. Both comments and pings are currently closed.