There’s been no movement in this thread for a while, but rather than starting another on the same topic I’d like to add my vote here and maybe restart it. Yes, please, some time vizualization would be a much valued addition to OF (badly needed, I’d say). I’ve only recently taken up my alpha option for OF and am excited by it. It seems set to be by far the best personal planning and organization app out there - clean, elegant, transparent, intuitive, a joy to use, like its sister Omni apps. But for many of us time vizualization is an intrinsic part of project and task management. By this I mean something that goes one modest step beyond OF as it is at the moment but without becoming in any way a fully-fledged, multi-person, large-scale project planner and manager of the OmniPlan or Merlin type.
For example, I’m a writer. I work on my own, but have several projects on the go concurrently: a novel I’m planning, a TV project I’m researching, several others. OF will greatly help to plan and manage tasks for these, but I also want to be able to map out visually how long each will last, how I can best allocate time and manage them concurrently, work out target dates for my agent, travel, etc. For me this is all of a piece with the listing and structuring of tasks, not some great step beyond them, and there must be many other activities, professional and otherwise, for which this is true. Some calendar or minimal Gantt-type view would be of enormous assistance in doing this. I don’t need anything heavy calibre, so OmniPlan et al are massive overkill; but OF as it stands just stops short of complete usefulness. An option might be to import time periods into iCal rather than just ToDos, but its capacity for this is pretty small and the results would be second-best at most. An in-built calendar/Gantt view in OF would be perfect, and surely should be a doddle to include for the creators of OmniPlan (much less than a lite version of this).
This all seems very obvious to someone in my position, but I’ve searched far and wide and there really seems to be nothing out there that does this. There are a billion task managers (though none as attractive as OF) and large-scale project managers, but nothing that fills this niche - which surely can’t be a small one, as there must be many people out there in a similar position. The only alternative I’ve found is to use something like ChartConstructor to build Gantt charts separately, but without the huge advantages of integration with the overall planner. Add this to OF and the app would just about be perfect, for someone like me at least, without making it too bloated for everyone else.
It would be great to read other views on this and build up some momentum on behalf of those of us who need such a feature. Meanwhile, I’m going to email this to the Omni guys separately as requested.