Quote:
Originally Posted by howiem
This relatively simple project took me about 15 minutes to rattle out, a couple of weeks ago. It would take ages to create on the iPad though, because the UI is all based around dialog boxes rather than just letting me type the damn stuff in.
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I was curious about how this would really stack up for someone who wasn't just getting acquainted with the program, so I tried the experiment. It took me about 12 minutes to enter the actions and contexts on my iPad, and another 8 or so to get the outline set up. However, it was not an ideal situation for me because I was doing this via quick entry into the inbox, and I already had 195 other items in my inbox, which had to be scrolled past every time I used the Move button (essentially once per row!) Because I felt that made the iPad look unnecessarily bad, I flattened out the project again, moved it all back to the inbox, and moved all the other stuff out of the inbox. A second attempt at doing the outline took 5 minutes without all the tedious scrolling over those unrelated actions. Somewhat better, about 17 minutes, still not ideal.
Fact of the matter, though, is I'm not going to type stuff like this in on my iPad except in an emergency. The 12 minutes it took to enter the actions and contexts was dominated by the speed (or lack thereof) of typing on the iPad. Typing it in again, on the Mac, without contexts (I usually enter them separately on the Mac because I find that is usually faster for me), it took a whopping 2 minutes to enter the text, and about 5 1/2 minutes to do the contexts and organizing. Using Simplenote as a proxy for how fast I might be able to simply type in action names if OmniFocus for iPad allowed similar entry to the Mac version, it took me almost 4 1/2 minutes (vs 2) to do the text entry on the iPad. I really slow down with text containing apostrophes or dashes, words for which the iPad helpfully wants to change the spelling, and if I'm not typing from my thoughts, I have to be very careful not to let my hands brush the screen surface when I look elsewhere at the source document or I end up with some random garbage inserted which then requires deletion. Yeah, a Bluetooth keyboard would probably help a lot with the first and third issues, but it isn't the sort of thing I would carry everywhere, and if I did expect to have to do a lot of typing, I could probably just bring the Macbook.
No, I'm not going to do it all again on the iPhone for the sake of comparison! :)