The wonderful Numbers

Posted by MadaboutDana
May 5, 2011 at 04:23 PM

I guess it’s all down to horses for courses. I’ve experimented with dozens of different task/project management apps, and I’ve found that there’s a real trade-off between bells and whistles and total confusion (where you actually spend more time fiddling around with task management than you spend doing the tasks!).

MLO looks very impressive, I will say. But: you have to pay money for the Pro service, and you have to pay again for the Cloud service… And it only runs on Windows and iPhone (not on Windows, Mac, iPhone, iPad and web browser, like Wunderlist).

Personally, I’ve tried using various outliners for task management, and always get frustrated. My favourite outliner in Windows, for example, is ListPro, for reasons I won’t bore you with, but I can’t use it as a task manager for long without feeling a strong need to scream (despite all the customisability!).

Commercially, I need a task manager that I can share with other people. Wunderlist (and CarbonFin) fit the bill wonderfully well - easy to share, easy to synchronise. And the learning curve on both of them is extremely shallow (a highly desirable business trait!), whereas I’ve found that some colleagues have a real resistance to working with outliners (they prefer simple categories/tags, and usually also some kind of date/calendar function).

Finally, Wunderlist is currently free, in all its incarnations. I don’t suppose that will last, but the boys in Berlin are tantalisingly teasing us with their next Big Thing, apparently some kind of collaboration platform, so I expect things will change.

Meanwhile we’re watching Apple with growing interest because of the rumoured iCloud launch in the summer, which may subsume both MobileMe and iWork.com. And mulling over whether we ought to change over to Apple Server in the near future, because of the highly desirable Spotlight feature, the unlimited clients, and the lovely online document preview function (apparently enhanced for Wiki Server 3, due out in OS X Lion). Not to mention all the sharing options, including WebDAV, CalDAV etc. etc. - perfect for intranets and extranets. Well, I say perfect: I should know better, having been disappointed in the past, but my optimism is based on considerable research!

Actually, it’s an exciting time to be a small business! Apart from minor economic/financial fluctuations, of course… aha, aha, aha…

Cheers,
Bill