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OF vs. Things Thread Tools Search this Thread Display Modes
I'm not sure how much this has been discussed already, but has there been some discussion on comparing these two apps? (Things is still Alpha). I found some info elsewhere comparing the two.

What is the advantage of OF vs. Things as far as we can tell? I'm not that familiar with either one yet (nor am I very familiar with GTD but I understand the basic ideas I think). As I understand it Things uses general tags instead of contexts and other columns with the idea that it is more flexible. I suppose this could be a positive or negative depending on your system.

I didn't want to spend too much time learning OF without any documentation to guide me (although the video is good), but I want to decide whether I should buy at the pre-release price.
 
I would say, you have the gist of it: Things uses tags heavily, relies on them. At this point OF does not have tags and you cannot assign a task to more than one context, although OF may support TAGS in a future version. And like you said, either approach will depend largely on your own personal system.

OF probably tries to be a bit stricter in following GTD principals.

Sometimes this works well, other times it seems like it works against you.
 
My advice, without spending the time going into all the reasons, of which there are some examples on the forum.

Trust OmniFocus.

It's the winning horse.
 
Things looks pretty nifty but it's just too immature (it's Alpha, and there's a ton of functionality that's not implemented yet) to really judge. It's a good 3-4 months behind where OmniFocus is.

Looks neat, but behavior isn't all there yet. Some major stuff isn't yet implemented. Which is fine, given it's alpha, but you have to decide if you want to use a product now or wait a few months before making a decision.
 
I've been playing around with both for a bit now and here is my quick take.

I found Things to be easier to understand going in. The initial use was just pleasing and more intuitive for me (yes, I realize this is very subjective).

However, once I began to understand how OF wanted me to work, I began to rely more and more on OF as its a deceptively deep application. OF is just one of those apps that the more you put into it and the more you learn it, the more you appreciate it. But there is more of a curve going in, at least that was my experience.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by knight777 View Post
I found Things to be easier to understand going in. The initial use was just pleasing and more intuitive for me (yes, I realize this is very subjective).
He he, yeah, my initial reaction was the opposite: that OmniFocus was more intuitive and pleasing to work with. But I agree that it's really too early to fairly judge Things. I'm not sure when they're planning on releasing, but it doesn't feel close to done yet.

Anyway, here was my first impression from a couple weeks ago:

http://forums.omnigroup.com/showthre...9107#post29107
 
One of the features I like about Things is that all of your completed tasks are captured in a logbook, removing them from your views while retaining them for future reference. Anybody know how to handle that in OF?

I also like that there is an Areas of Focus tag. I am using Project Folders now for my Areas of Focus in OF, but I am not sure if there is a better way.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by FredH View Post
I didn't want to spend too much time learning OF without any documentation to guide me (although the video is good), but I want to decide whether I should buy at the pre-release price.
The online help (available from the Help menu in OmniFocus) has a few sections fleshed out -- that might be enough to help you get a little deeper sense. Look for these to be fleshed out a bit more as we get ever-closer to the final release.
 
Quote:
Originally Posted by iannarino View Post
One of the features I like about Things is that all of your completed tasks are captured in a logbook, removing them from your views while retaining them for future reference. Anybody know how to handle that in OF?

I also like that there is an Areas of Focus tag. I am using Project Folders now for my Areas of Focus in OF, but I am not sure if there is a better way.
The problem with the Logbook approach is that it disassociates the items from their projects and surrounding actions, so that when I look at them in Things' Logbook they don't make any sense and are completely out of context. I much prefer OF's approach of keeping completed items in their projects with all their contextual data and then control visibility with filters. You can achieve the same result as Things' Logbook by just displaying Completed actions using the View Bar.

As for Areas of Focus, what's wrong with using folders in OF? Isn't that their intended purpose? In fact, I think OF's implementation is more flexible and gives you a lot more control (e.g. nesting). Unless I'm misunderstanding the purpose of the Areas sidebar container in Things, it doesn't seem to have much practical value in that app.
 
The deal breaker for me at present with Things is that all projects are treated as parallel in nature - there is no way to work with sequential projects. I don't know about you, but the vast bulk of my projects tend to be sequential.

The net effect of this is that when you are filtering your next actions by context-based tags within Things, you are presented with actions that are not doable yet as the preceding actions have not been completed.

So if Project A is sequential and has two tasks, Task A tagged with 'mac' and Task B tagged with 'out' and I filter my next actions to only show 'out' tasks, then I will be presented with Task B. Which is unworkable for me.

This might well be a function of Things being in alpha and that this will be sorted out in due course.

Otherwise I liked the interface - it still needs more keyboard shortcuts but they are coming I believe. I liked the ability to access a project's tasks by right-arrowing into the associated task list.
 
 


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