[Rickard B]

Excellent thread!

What IS going on in business of task management apps???

As I see it, there are three options out there (the big three);

1. OmniFocus
2. Things
3. The Hit List

And guess what? They all suck in their own special way! Lets analyze this list in reverse order.

The Hit List

My long time favorite and last one of the three I tried. The longer I used the more I loved it! It seemed to implement the best characteristics of both Omni and Things, as well as being more intuitive and creative than both. All was good until it seemed like the dev. just disappeared from the face of the earth! WHO does that?? THL had a stable fan/user base and an excellent app, development was slow at times but stuff happened and got implemented in the app. Now its unusable due to the lack of support, and I can't for the life of me figure out why this company didn't get acquired or something by someone else...

Things

My first app. Not much to say really, what it does it does quite well. To bad it doesn't do much at all! Im baffled about the "strategy" to not include subtasks. Development is unbelievably slow, first adding cloud sync about a million years after everyone else. And so on.

OmniFocus

There is probably no need for my rant on OmniFocus. Just study your own forums. Anyway, OmniFocus is the most stable, robust and promising piece of software out there, with an excellent family of apps. BUT you seem to consider customer requests as "a bother" which should be corrected because the we, the customers/users, obviously is using OmniFocus wrongly. Like Things, features take eons of time to implement, if they ever show up. What ever happened to the promise of OmniPlan-Omnifocus sync back in 2007? (SIX YEARS AGO???)

So, what my question really is...

Is there something I should know about the task management development industry? Am I missing something? How come e.g. THL evolved quite quickly into a stable and good app, as did Things and OmniFocus, only to "slack of" and taking years get stuff done/refusing to hear customers? Shouldn't you be grateful that customers actually cares enough to give an opinion? Shouldn't you be grateful that you have customers? Bad karma dudes!

My own theory states: You (and Things) lack competition. I, and Im guessing a lot of users, are here trying to make OmniFocus work for us because its LEAST worst of the alternatives. I see the same tendency in the Things user forums.

Basically I think this is a leadership issue due to the lack of healthy competition. Hopefully, a real competitor will emerge someday and you will once again have to work hard for your customers. You make great apps, but no progress whatsoever.