[aeiou11235]

Hello.

I just wanted to say that I definetly also am looking for a project management application that can handle several projects running at the same time. I am a freelance photographer and most of the time I am working alone on 3 to 6 projects at the same time, sometimes including other "resources" (people like assistants, labs, locationscouts,...).

The Omni applications are the best applications on the market because they are simple and logical and not as ugly as most of the stuff one can get. It's cool to work with them. Also Omniplan is a great application, and it's the only application that comes near to my imagination of a good application, but it's not yet there.

Anyway I want to describe what I was looking for, so maybe this helps someone (maybe the programmers / developers , who knows).

On the basis of Omniplan I would like to be able to completely plan and schedule my tasks and dates, that are connected with several projects. I would like to set up my general working time, then do project-outlines, set milestones and deadlines and time-estimates for them and have Omniplan do a proposal for me, how to plan my week without getting too bored. I get very fast bored, that means: I love to work on two, three (or more) projects a day, one after another. Instead of working on one task of one project on 2 days for 10 hours each I like to mix my projects and work on - let s say - three projects, each 3 to 4 hours a day.

I would like to see Omniplan make a schedule for me, with blocks for the amount of time in iCal (instead of 24-hour-columns, as it is right now), for several projects a day. For example: 10am to 1pm is project a, 2pm to 5pm is project b, 5pm to 8pm is project c. If I am not confident with "the mixture" of my daily plan, I can still re-arrange those blocks in iCal, that wouldn't be a function that Omniplan would have to do, but Omniplan should - in my digital dreams - be able to give me a proposal how I can structure my calendar. That would be ideal.

I don't know if that makes sense for someone else, but for me this sounds good.

One could even think one step further and develop OP so far, that it really gets GTD-orientated. For example if I have 5 jobs running and one of the tasks in every job is connected to "laboratory" then it would be ideal, if OP would just try to schedule all those five lab-walks to the same day. But maybe that's illusionary...

Anyway, the problems for me at the moment are, that OP:

a) makes 24hour blocks in my iCal file and I also don't like to have long allday-event-rows in my calendar

b) if I put my own "resource" availability to 30% then my estimated time, that I need for work, triples; this doesn't make sense (I don't need to work 3 times longer because I'm not on 30% "power" but because I only want to use 30% of my time for this task); my working time stays the same, it just takes longer, that's a significant difference

c) if I put more than one project into OP, then OP exports all the projects into one iCal calendar (with one colour/label), so it gets impossible to differentiate what task belongs to which project. (it would be great to get an option to assign project-titles in front of the tasks/dates anyway...if one task of my project "xyz advertisement" is "send out final pictures" and I import the task into iCal, then "send out final pictures" could belong to three other projects... it would be great to have an option to add the title of the project to every task (like "xyz ad - send out final pictures")

...that s about it.

Anyway: I don't see too much usability for me right now, because OP can not handle more than one project, but I am very sure that I will try it for several biggger projects, thought it's sad that it has not yet the functionality that I would need to make my planning-efforts a little more simple...

Thanks,


aeiou11235

PS: apologies for my odd schoolbook-english.
PPS: Does anyone know an alternative to OP until it's "ripe"?