[wlow]

Let's be blunt. It is ugly. It is off-putting in its ugliness. It's disappointing when you should be wowing customers. Both Things and that other ToDo app that is selling well are beautiful to look at, but this strikes me as a quick port of the iphone app and I wonder why on Earth it took so long. There certainly is no reimagination of GTD on the iPad.

Someone once said of a well designed bridge that it must have both function *and* form, i.e., it must support weight, of course, but that it must also be beautiful if only so people form an emotional bond to it and want to maintain it. There is no question that you guys do function very well but you don't seem to respect form as much as the other guys. Customers intuit quality from good form design and the visual cluckiness of your iPad app as represented in the video does not project quality. There are going to be customers buying based on screenshots who will choose the other apps because of the attention to form detail both in layout and at the pixel level, which is lacking here. Watch how much Steve Jobs points out all the little visual design details when he introduced OS X for the first time (it's on YouTube); he told his team he wanted the user to want to lick the screen - is your current design that emotionally engaging? No, it's pedestrian - it looks like a Windows XP app, like Windows Explorer. You haven't even reworked the icons.

As for reimaging GTD say for example some projects are more important to me than others. Is there a visual cue for this so I will zero in on these projects? Maybe these icons could be larger than less important projects. Maybe if there is a lot of actions, the project icon can take on a stack appearance like the iPhoto stack icons in iPad vary depending how many pictures are inside. I've always wanted a better visual cue for an action that I've allotted a lot of time to as oppose to a little time - even with the hr, min designations, it doesn't convey visually the way say fonts metacommunicate more than the written word can. Wow in a wow-like font says wow better than wow in helvetica. Finding ways to visually metacommunicate an idea like "important project" or "day consuming action" aids your user in ways that yet another line in an outline do not.

I understand that Omnifocus came out of the outliner app, but I think that metaphor is hampering real, constuctive reimagining. Are you in the outlining business or the GTD business?