I LOVE the idea of a web front end. I wish Omni would survey their customers to find out just how many of us there are in this boat.
Needless to say - I am very interested in the Spootnik product (Mac at home, Windows at work, web front end sounds awesome, I'm mildly curious about the Basecamp thing) but am hesitant to make the switch until I know a few more things about it.
- Even if Omni is not officially supporting this product, are they at least 'cool' with it? In other words: If they're planning major upgrades or improvements for future versions of OF, will there be opportunities for Buzzard (Lars Steiger) to stay abreast of them? Or will we someday be faced with a situation where a major OF update drops, and Lars has to play catch-up for some weeks/months before everything plays nicely again together?
- I am guessing I have to switch from syncing my data using MobileMe to using Lars' server, which I know nothing about, nor whether I can trust it. (Both from a privacy standpoint as well as a data redundancy standpoint.)
- Even if I felt that Lars' sync server was bulletproof and trustable, I wish I could still sync my personal life via MobileMe and just my work projects via this product. In other words, I wish that top-level projects or folders could be synced via different means or to different database files.
- Even if I felt that Lars' sync server was bulletproof and trustable, would my company also be willing to trust that our sensitive client information would be safe? It's enough convincing them to use Basecamp.
But wait, there's more. Here's a hypothetical real-world use case for the product:
- Let's say that I have bought OF for Mac OS X, iPhone and iPad. All money well spent. (But still, $140 total.) I use MobileMe, which I pay a yearly subscription for ($99), but if I wanted to nerd out, I could host my own WebDAV server and sync there. The point is, there are cheap or free options already available, and Omni is also beta-testing their own sync services at the present time.
- Now let's say that I convince my boss that it's worth spending $49/month for Basecamp, which would get us 35 active projects, 15 GB of online storage, unlimited users, and time tracking. So the company pays that bill. In my line of work, each of those projects would correlate to a proposal or job that's in the pipeline, that a number of people from our company need to collaborate on.
- There is a matching Spootnik plan, 'Premium' for $15 more per month, that syncs those 35 basecamp projects with OF, as well as provides me with that web front end to OF. But who pays for Spootnik? My company is probably going to say, "Well, WE pay for Basecamp, and you're perfectly capable of using the web interface like everyone else." Okay, so that's on me.
- Furthermore, since I am presuming that Spootnik has to sync my data (all of it - work and personal) in order to do its thing, does that mean that anyone else at my company who also wants to use Spootnik to sync against those same 35 Basecamp projects, has to pay another $15 for their own Premium Spootnik account, to accomplish the same thing? In other words, how many times does Spootnik have to be licensed in order to sync those same 35 Basecamp projects between each of us? I'm guessing the answer is, "as many times as you have individual OF users."
If the product does the web interface for OF
really well, and protects my data appropriately, then it's worth $3 / month. I'm just not sure about the Basecamp integration, especially when you scale it across multiple users.