Apple Briefs

MacWorld today (that’s yesterday for those of you in the East) posted a review of OmniFocus. I point this out primarily to put in an early plug for my Things review that I will be wrapping up over the weekend and posting Monday. The review is short, but hopefully it will give you enough of a GTD fix until Monday.

Apple held an iPhone event today at which two topics were discussed. First up were the enterprise announcements Apple referred to when news of the event was first released. The announcements involved the two areas in which the iPhone has been most often criticized or use in the enterprise: email integration and security.

Enterprise Email: The iPhone will have built-in integration with Microsoft Exchange servers. Push email, contacts, and calendar events will be supported. Global address book support is also included. To me the big word from the announcement is push. I would like to be notified when I get a new email. Right now I have to get out the iPhone, unlock it, click on the Mail icon, and go to the email account I want to check. I’ll be interested to see how energy efficient the push email solution is. Push email won’t be useful if it means the iPhone’s battery can’t last the whole day.

The only drawback I see so far is that it requires the use of an Exchange server. As a Mac user, I wouldn’t be too happy about having to buy a Windows box to run Exchange just so I could get push email on my iPhone. What I would really like to see is push email on the iPhone powered by Leopard Server.

Security: The iPhone will receive a big security boost too. Most users won’t care about this, but their IT departments certainly will. One of the big fears about allowing corporate email access on the iPhone was what would happen if an iPhone is stolen. The iPhone’s remote wipe feature will allow the IT department to disable or delete at least part of the iPhone’s data (it’s unclear if the wipe feature will extend to everything on the phone or just the Exchange component).

Other security features include:

• Cisco IPsec VPN
• Two-factor authentication, certificates and identities
• Enterprise-class Wi-Fi with WPA2/802.1x
• Tools to enforce security policies

There’s a lot there to love, and it looks like Apple really listened well to the corporate IT folks.

The other set of announcements from Apple today relate to the iPhone SDK. The SDK (software development kit) is what allows people to write their own applications for the iPhone. Apart from games (something else to do on the train on the way to work), it looks like developers will be able to write some really cool applications. I won’t get into the details, but Apple has put together a pretty good set of tools for writing iPhone applications.

I am already excited about one application coming to the iPhone: OmniFocus. The ink was barely dry and the guys at The Omni Group were already announcing an iPhone application for OmniFocus. I like OmniFocus, but my big problem is that I don’t get to use my Mac for most of the day. My standard operating procedure has been to email myself reminders. I can create tasks in OmniFocus with emails, but I want real remote access to my task lists. That’s where an OmniFocus iPhone application comes in. I can’t wait!

Apple has a video of the event up on it’s website. You might get bored once they start talking about the SDK, but if you stick around you’ll get to see some cool video of Touch Fighter.

I know you’re all waiting for the Apple Briefs review of OmniFocus that is sure to appear Any Day Now^TM. Actually, as I stated previously, I am waiting until Things is feature complete because I plan to do a comparison review (or, more likely, a series of reviews) and I want it to be a fair comparison. In the meantime, you can head on over to The Omni Group blog to check out a new video on OmniFocus Basics. There are no big GTD secrets in the video, but it does cover the basic features of OmniFocus well.

The past few days saw two big announcements related to Macintosh GTD software. Yesterday, The Omni Group announced the release of version 1.0 of OmniFocus. I have been using OmniFocus since the private beta, and really enjoy using it.

We also saw the public release of Things, a new GTD app from the makers of Xyle Scope. Xyle Scope is an excellent application that I have used for quite some time (but I expect that most of my readers haven’t – it’s primarily useful for web developers). Things looks quite good, and I look forward to trying it out. The name “Things” does make for some interesting grammar, doesn’t it?

Some of the similarities and differences between OmniFocus and Things are readily apparent from the Things video demo. I am really curious how Things’ emphasis on tags plays out in every day use. I am going to reserve a full review and comparison with OmniFocus until Things gets closer to a 1.0 release.

I did something I hadn’t planned on doing for a while – write an article about another application from The Omni Group.¹ I have good reason, though. Over the weekend, The Omni Group announced a public beta² of a task-management application called OmniFocus.

I have been using OmniFocus for several months now as part of the private beta program and have been quite impressed. My calendar needs are pretty simple, and iCal serves those needs well. The iCal To Do feature, though, hasn’t worked for keeping track of my tasks. The only way to categorize a task in iCal is to assign it to a calendar. That becomes quite cumbersome as the number of calendars grows because the primary way to distinguish one calendar from another is by color.

OmniFocus was inspired by David Allen’s Getting Things Done. OmniFocus isn’t the first Mac GTD application. But for me, at least, OmniFocus is the best of the bunch. I have listed the other Mac GTD applications that I know of at the end of article. If you know of any that aren’t listed, let me know and I will add them.

OmniFocus has the tools to make GTD work. OmniFocus lets me capture whatever I am thinking about as a task. I can annotate the task by writing notes or attaching file, so I can get rid of the email or piece of paper that got me thinking about the task. If I know right away that the task will be a big task, I can create the task as a separate project. If I discover later that a task is more complicated than I first thought, I can promote it from a task to a project at that time. In this way, OmniFocus lets me break down my tasks into discrete steps, so I always know what I have to do next.

Probably the best way to understand OmniFocus and how it can help you get organized is to see it in use. The Omni Group has a 15-minute video on their website about how to use OmniFocus and what it can do.

OmniFocus won’t replace your calendar application. But, if your task-management system involves pieces of physical paper or more than one application, you might want to take a look at OmniFocus.

¹ I promise this will be the last one for a while. The Omni Group has several other applications, but I only use OmniWeb and OmniFocus regularly.

² Beta software is pre-release software that the company allows people to use so the software can be tested as much as possible. It also happens to be great marketing by allowing people to use the software free for many months.