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I know I'll get flamed for this, but I WAS insanely excited to play with OmniFocus! I thought it would be the best, since it was of course an Omni product... I waited for my turn to be "summoned", downloaded it and launched it and...

woah.

Okay, so I get that it's "Kinkless.app". I understand (sort of) the reasoning behind doing that (I also used Kinkless, and thought it was pretty great). But this program is so intellectually unfinished--not code-wise, but thought-wise-- that I almost can't use it. Me, a GTD-obsessed, "Zen of Mac"-living, productivity junkie. The damn thing just isn't designed in an intuitive way.

I don't want to be overly negative. I really want OF to be awesome. Here's just a few of the things I've noticed:

1. Someone PLEASE tell me why every single thing must be done through QuickEntry? Why must everything go through the Inbox, even if we already know what context it'll be in? Why can we not simply go to a Context and click "Add Action"?? Is this not a logical idea?

Clicking "Add Action" while in contexts view switches your view BACK to projects and adds an action in whatever random project you were last looking at (usually something from several hours ago). If I delete the line that got entered for me (as a result of this behavior), and maybe delete the few on top that also resulted from this (when ALL I WANTED TO DO was add a 5-minute action to my @online context!!), I run the risk of deleting the entire project - the project header is the same as all other lines of text, so if it gets deleted one must go back to the left side of the window, click the plus, fill out any important info relating to it, etc. Why can you delete projects from within their Action view? Project management (addition/deletion) should be confined to the left panel-- it is the ONLY way this makes sense. Has Apple ever shown the name of an iTunes playlist above its songs and made it possible for you to delete the first track, accidentally hit delete again and REMOVE THE PLAYLIST? No.

I know that if you've got a project in mind, you can bypass Inbox by Adding an Action, but that wording gives no indication that Actions can (for some reason) only be added to projects which may or may not be what you're currently looking at If the button is going to SWITCH YOUR VIEW, it had better indicate as such. This is simply poor UI design.

2. While in Contexts view, you are unable to move ANY actions. I have plenty of single-time ("5-minute-rule") actions that I'd prefer to not get BURIED under a mass of project-related actions. The default behavior is, quite frankly, stupid. Can we at least put them up top, above all of our longer-term Action commitments (if we aren't going to be able to manually sort them)?

3. The Project View +/- buttons are frustrating. THEY work as expected, but adding an action requires a different button (Add Action)? Why not the traditional row of double plus/minus buttons? This would also allow for the obvious solution to being able to create new contexts, as well as the actions within them, in a logical way.

4. The "clean up" button, and its functionality, are so frustrating for a DESKTOP-CLASS APPLICATION that I don't know where to begin. These are computers. They can clean up after themselves. It's things like this that make me wonder if our technology's actually made any kind of impact on our getting work done, or if it's just taking up extra CPU cycles. What we have here is a manually-correcting To-Do list.

5. I'm assuming Process (as a GTD phase) is simply not in the code yet. It's probably the most important of all, so please, please try to make it intuitive?

6. The Omni Inspector was cool in 10.0.3. It's not cool anymore. There are so many better ways of implementing the same functions ("Dashboard"-type popups, a quick balloon-help type entry field, a small area at the bottom of the main window... I know drawers aren't in vogue anymore either, but they sure beat Inspector windows). Having to keep that damn thing on-screen all the time, just to use when making EDITS, is a nuisance. I know you guys are real fond of the Inspector (it's in every Omni program), but for the limited range of functions a program like OF is supposed to have compared to a monster like OmniPlan, this kind of thing can be simplified immensely.

I would never have expected it, but it is such an incredible headache adding items to, and managing items within, Omnifocus. Simple steps, such as adding a new book to @reading or turning an accidentally-created Project into a single-time Action, are needlessly complicated and continually remind one that they are interfacing with a COMPUTER. This is so un-Maclike that I'm sad to see it come from Omni... I don't want to HAVE to use Quicksilver (though, God, I love it) in order to escape your UI!

Please, please remember that the reason for task management software is to allow you to focus on your work, and not on learning the software. I'm a smart guy, but OF is just unintuitive. (Ask a HI designer at Apple if you want someone more well-versed than I to really tear it apart...) I'm even going to venture that anyone who says otherwise has not really stepped back and examined it from the perspective of how "normal people" might use it.

Speaking of un-Maclike, I am using iGTD at the moment and find that at least it's logical--even though interface-wise it's a dog, it has a rhythm to its views/task management that is easy to pick up and use. It's trivial for me to add new tasks, in whatever view I happen to be in, and then get right to work. I'm not hawking iGTD by any means, since it has plenty of flaws, but the developer does understand how people use the software. I would humbly suggest that OmniGroup at least take a look at it.

[rant off]