[Danworld]

Thanks everyone for the ideas. Let me update about what I'm thinking now.

I discovered The Hit List and it's a great program. It seems that the project was largely dead for a while, but over the past few months they've got it going again and it looks promising. I was almost ready to call it a day and make The Hit List my final choice.

It's a rather elegant solution yet it's feature-rich. It has just about everything found in OF, and even has some advantages: for example, smart folders are just superior to perspectives, and THL allows multiple contexts/tags. There's too many other nice touches to list here, but I'll also mention that tabs and back/forward browsing are really nice.

Perhaps my biggest problem with OF is how, out of the box, it forces you into a fairly confined workflow and makes context so central to everything. It's rather ideal if you can benefit from contexts, but for many people (and I think this number is increasing as life gets more digital and integrated), context is of much less importance. Take the hypothetical case of someone who happens to be able to perform any task from anywhere: they will still benefit from a task management system based on GTD principles, even though they would have absolutely no use of context in the traditional GTD sense. If OF is primarily a "context task management system", then it's subpar for a lot of people who would otherwise want to use the most feature-rich and elegant product available. And this is not because they somehow just "don't get it" with regards to context; context is simply marginally useful at best for those people.

THL has a really cool and cute UI idea with the yellow notepads, but it does have its drawbacks. I like the feeling of manipulating discrete task/project "objects", and Things does this the best I feel. But OF also does it better than THL. I don't like idea of having piles of yellow note-pads being where my modern trusted organization system is located, with each task/project being little more than a scribble on a notepad.

Also, being able to fully trust your GTD system is of fundamental importance. THL is basically a one-man operation whereas OF is a much larger and established company with generally excellent responsiveness to customer issues. I think that in 5 years, I'd be much better served by the latest OF than the latest THL. For the sort of life investment it takes to get set up in a trusted GTD system, I want to pick one and stick with it. Also, at this point, THL does feel a little unpolished and even buggy; it's nothing major, but enough to affect your level of trust.

But I am rooting for THL. It's a wonderful product that is superior to Things and even OF in many ways. Things had a great program going in, but they have proven themselves a disaster with managing the product in to the future. It's amazing to think about how much they've lost in the way of potential profits.

I have now spent significant time dealing with the various programs, so I have a better feel for how OF should work and what it's capable of. My plan for today is to streamline OF and see if I can get along fine with it. This is a rather steep-learning curve for OF to require out of the box, but I'm going to try to see if I can get it to work. And I seem to feel differently every day about which product to chose, so this may not be the final choice, we will see; it's still a trade-off no matter which one you pick.

I'm hoping that OF 2.0 will come out fairly soon with enhanced features, an elegant UI, and less forcing people in to the flow of somebody with a strict multi-context occupation (while of course keeping that an important option for those who want it). Omni should make OF 2.0 such that potential customers don't feel like they are making a trade-off anymore! :)