Where are the exciting developments?

Posted by Randall Shinn
Jan 22, 2009 at 05:37 PM

Chris Thompson wrote:
>The Mac environment is still going strong. OmniFocus 2.0 is in development,
>OmniOutliner 4.0 is (finally) in development. The Hit List was just released. Circus
>Ponies Notebook 3.0 was just released three months ago (seriously, that’s become one
>impressive application!). Curio gets frequent revisions.
> >Journler was always
>more shareware than a commercial product, and it had too many good competitors for the
>developer to keep going with it.
> An interesting aspect of this list of software is the issue of synchronization. OmniFocus functions well with MobileMe. The files for OmniOutliner, The Hit List, Circus Ponies Notebook, and Curio can all be placed in iDisk or Drop Box, and thereby be synced between different computers. (So far, for me, Drop Box [free] seems considerably faster.)

Journler seems difficult to synch in this way. A few people have apparently made it work with Drop Box, but others found it wasn’t reliable. You can synch the files using a program like ChronoSync, but it means remembering to do it, and carrying a USB drive. Together synches via Mobile Me, but it seems to still have some issues with that. (I’ve had problems, and I’ve read about others with this issue. It too can be reliably synched with something like ChronoSync, as long as the program is closed.)

OmniFocus seems to have the synch issue worked out well with its database. Together seems to still be working this out. I can understand how hard this would be to do when your database has multiple files, as compared to programs where you only have to sync a single file. For me, being able to sync over the Internet is a wonderful convenience, and this seems particularly true when you are talking about software that you use to manage projects and keep daily notes about projects. (Long-term storage items are not so likely to need onging synching.)

Randall