Yesterday OmniFocus for iPad was released, and while I was waiting for this release I was kinda put off by it’s high price: €31,99. Considering I already bought the Mac version ($79,95) and the iPhone version (€15,99 and not really usable sync-performance-wise for the first year) this just seems a lot. In comparison: Things, which is a fairly comparable program, is only €7,99 for iPhone and €15,99 for iPad (unfortunately also not a universal app); so I could buy both mobile Things versions for less than just the iPad version of OmniFocus! The only major difference I could see is the inability of Things to sync using anything else than a local WiFi network, although they say this would be coming sometime this year.

And here’s the Thing (pun intended): I do have a license for the current version of Things, given to me by the nice people from CulturedCode because once I donated to one of the earlier GTD Mac applications iGTD. So I think now is the time to seriously try out this much appreciated program, starting with just my personal/home todo’s and possibly followed by my much much bigger list of work-related tasks.

So I set off, and while discovering the basic divisions of work used in Things called Areas of responsibility and Projects, I soon discovered that the perceived simpleness of Things in comparison to OmniFocus was a bliss – it all fell nicely into place, defining more general tasks in the Areas and grouping lists of tasks in Projects, which can go into Areas themselves. Tasks can be ordered within its container as a means of defining dependencies or maybe priorities. I didn’t even yet started using tags, but I did use the quick entry feature fairly similar to OmniFocus’ one to add a mail message directly into Things, which worked seamlessly.

Things provides you with a couple of predefined lists among which is the Next list, displaying tasks that should be done next neatly grouped by Area and Project, making it easy to choose among them. Another list is the Today list, which displays tasks marked for Today ungrouped (as set by default in the preferences) which makes it possible to order all tasks for today unrelated to their Area or Project. That is a mighty handy feature!

This is roughly how far I got using Things today, and I must say it was easy, fun and most importantly: non-distracting from the actual task-management process. It makes me trust this little application to show me what I need to see when I need it, which in my opinion is one of the most important aspects of the Getting Things Done methodology. The most obvious feature missing is indeed syncing to a mobile device over internet using e.g. MobileMe – I would miss this at work while walking around with only my iPhone, although I must say the OmniFocus experience in this regard is not perfect either (mostly due to waiting for syncs to finish, forgetting to sync before quitting the app or closing your Mac’s lid). And wait, don’t I have WiFi at work so this might not even be a problem?

Looking at my limited experience with Things so far I would say I can do anything I can do with Things with OmniFocus also. It strikes me however that I’ve been long looking for a good way to use OmniFocus corresponding with how I work, and in Things it seemed to just fit. Undoubtedly this depends on how you actually manage your tasks and the diversity or complexity of your work (I think in my work I have both high up any scale). I would say OmniFocus provides more flexibility in this matter, however the key question remains: do you actually need it?

Having gotten iPhoto (v8) myself with my new MacBook Pro, I simply start this program, and access her library from there. After copying the files to my iPhoto library (directly dragging to Aperture does show the +-cursor, but does not work) I can then import them in my Aperture library. Tedious, but it works. Most of the time.

During copying of the shared photos to my computer, I often get a message that some of the photos could not be imported due to their file type not begin recognized. After some investigation, I discovered that the photos giving this message have the file type ‘GEPJ’, which incidentally is JPEG spelled backward… Now where does that come from??

Most photos with this problem will successfully import a second time around. However, you have to redo your carefully made selection of photos to copy all over, because iPhoto forgets your selection as soon as it starts importing. There is an easier way though: in the error message of iPhoto, a path is displayed, which looks something like ‘/var/folders/Jf/Jf5z8CcW2RSzKE+1YogdOU+++TI/-Tmp-/iPhoto/DPAP/10.0.1.2/8770/1′. Yes, that’s a weird path. You can copy this path from the iPhoto dialog and paste it in the Finder in the dialog you get when pressing cmd-shift-G (Go to Folder). In this folder, you will see all photos you were trying to import, which you can then drag manually to iPhoto, or even directly to Aperture . I presume however, that all iPhoto-specific meta-data that is not embedded in the photo itself (using EXIF) will be lost this way.

The iPad looks really terrific. I could easily see one lying around here in the living room somewhere. I could find the use for some nice piece of hardware that is easy to grab and start browsing, typing, or emailing on.

Most comments I hear are about a missing camera and multitasking. The camera just seems an obvious growthpath for Apple to me and I’m not surprised it didn’t make it in the first version. Although it would have been very nice in combination with a version of iChat to go with it.

Multitasking however would be something that I would really miss on a device this size. On the iPhone I rarely really miss it – switching between apps with the speed they do while retaining their current state is something that was easy to get used to with such a small screen. Now with the bigger iPad screen, I would love to put things in parallel, from different applications and within one application. I haven’t seen the possibility of putting two sites, or to iWork documents next to each other in the demos, let alone a site in Safari and a Pages document. This is something that isn’t too hard to imagine to be very handy. Add to that some messenger or twitter application running in the background, and you got your environment really going.

If the first version of the iPad doens’t support multitasking, at least it should support the Dashboard. In my opinion this would be the ideal place for the iPad to hide common functionality like the calculator, weather app and twitter client. It is easily accessible (with a specific gesture, for example), web-based and therefor not really running two apps at once. It would be really awkward to switch to another application (or get your iPhone out of your pocket) just to do a quick calculation when e.g. typing in Pages.

Speaking of which, I couldn’t find the Weather and Calculator apps in any of the screenshots of the iPad I’ve seen. Maybe Apple is already working on a Dashboard?

With Safari 4 I decided to retry Apple’s default Mac browser, because of the nice new technologies it provides (HTML 5, web font rendering, newest CSS features), and because it will then render on my Mac exactly like it does on my iPhone, even syncing bookmarks between them. So I set out to try it, and a couple of weeks later, I decided to not go back.

It works then – but what were my most missed Firefox features and most positive Safari experiences? Here’s a list of differences that mattered to me:

• Web inspector and Firebug
  Safari’s Web inspector does roughly the same as  the Firebug plugin for Firefox: it makes it possible to view webpages’ DOM trees, browse and search through them, select them using visual feedback, and probably most used by me: change the CSS styling of elements on the fly. It’s a great way to debug CSS for multibrowser compatibility, or tweak the design of a site by starting to change some values and just playing around. This is how I started changing the layout of this site as well. Both do their job quite well and allow you also to check which element of the website loads the slowest. The only thing I miss in Web inspector which Firebug does allow you to do, is actually add new styles on the fly; in Safari you can only change values of already existing properties, as far as I could find.
• Top sites and Fast dial
  Safari 4′s much touted feature is Top sites. I had a somewhat similar plugin for Firefox called Fast dial, but it isn’t nearly as beautiful as Top sites. Fast dial doesn’t automatically add your most visited sites, however it does let you define more precisely what you would like to put in as top sites and when to refresh their thumbnail. It also can show editable titles beneath the thumbnails when hovering over them, which can become in handy if you have several sites that look pretty much the same, like I have with a couple of internal support sites from my work.
• You need something to view your sources
  Firefox displays HTML source code nicely rendered and styled; Safari 4 doesn’t do this by default. Of course you can use the Web inspector (see before) but it isn’t the same as just viewing the HTML separately because of the structured hierarchical display it uses. However, with a simple Safari plugin called SafariSource, this is easily fixed. It does need SIMBL, which is known to sometimes cause problems with some users. I’ve had none though.
• View rendered XML documents
  Frankly, Safari handles XML documents appallingly.  Normal web view shows next to nothing, source code view mostly has no correct line endings. Firefox does a very nice job by default of displaying XML documents rendered on screen. In this case I had to install the XML View Plugin for Safari, which goes directly in your Internet Plug-ins and works like a charm, rendering and syntax coloring your XML documents in the main window.
• General tab navigation and search
  Some basic features of Firefox like saving open tabs when quitting, opening new windows always in tabs, type-ahead search (just start typing) and using keywords in the address bar I also missed. When I used Safari in the past, I already discovered and used the Saft plugin for Safari, and I decided that I wanted it again (upgrade to a version compatible with this Safari) to enhance my browsing experience. The plugin allows you to define how your tabs should opened, saved (on quiting or as ‘undo close tab’ feature) and navigated, allows keyword searches from the address bar and lots more. It also includes a simple version of type-ahead search which doesn’t support spaces in your search, which is pretty annoying; all in all I’m more and more getting used to typing cmd-f first.
• Speed
  All in all, Safari 4 felt faster than Firefox 3. This is different per site of course, and will differ with every update probably. Still, it felt very fast to start with, and does still feel that way when recomparing. Part of this is also due to the fast window-drawing of Safari in Mac OS X: bringing the browser to the front displays it immediately, where Firefox can take just that fraction of a second longer to be reactivated. Seeing that I switch away from my browser and back pretty often, that’s something that counts as well.
• Bookmark syncing
  The more I also use my iPhone to browse the web, the more import it becomes to be able to easily share bookmarks. Of course Delicious comes to mind, but there is no handy way of using the service from the iPhone as of yet. Therefor being able to sync bookmarks over the air (using mobileMe) to your Mac is invaluable. Using third party sync services it would be possible to sync those Safari-based bookmarks to Firefox and back as well, but for me every extra step in a sync process is certainly one extra chance of making it not work transparently.

There are at the end still some things I miss in Safari though:

• There  is no ‘Refresh frame’ option in the contextual menu, only ‘Reload page’ which reloads an entire frameset. This is really a missing feature.
• I liked the loading progress bar behind the address bar in previous versions of Safari – so much that I actually intalled Fission in Firefox to do roughly the same there. Now it isn’t available anymore in Safari 4.
• Firefox has the ability to remember Zoom level per site – this can be really nice if you’re having trouble reading a specific site every time you go there, or in my case, to decrease the font size of our Mantis pages, to have a better overview of all issue lists. Safari can zoom, but doesn’t remember the setting per site – it does this on a per-window basis.
• In Firefox I used Fasterfox, a plugin that can customize your network settings (pipelining and such), and displays the actual loading time of a site in the bottom right corner of the status bar. This last simple feature is something I sometimes miss in Safari nowadays.
• There is no way in Safari to directly select a specific open tab. You can switch through tabs using control-tab and control-shift-tab (actually the same shortcut as Windows has to switch between documents in a multi-document interface), but the way Firefox allows this is way more powerful: just press cmd-1 for the first tab, cmd-2 for the second, etc. Safari reserves those shortcuts for the first, second etc. favorite in Top sites, which is a shortcut I never actually needed.
• Lastly something that I don’t really miss, but for Suzan is one of the biggest reasons not to use Safari, is the missing address bar drop down with recently visited sites. As soon as you’re used to have that available to navigate most of the sites you visit regularly, adding a Top sites feature is just not enough to get used to another way of browsing.

One of the powers of Firefox is its big community of plugin developers and an already existing archive of useful and less useful plugins. Fortunately, also Safari has its sources, albeit a lot smaller. For some interesting plugins you can best start at PimpMySafari.com.

My old shareware IP Reporter and TV Reminder are now available for free. A working, public serial is posted on the Software page. Active support has also ended at this point. I’m also considering releasing the source code.

Enjoy!

Focus shows a gorgeous floating icon of the currently active application with an optional analog or digital clock, and has lots of configuration possibilities.

Version 2.7 finalizes Leopard compatibility by making sure it is always visible, even when using Spaces. Its icon is also updated to be more Leopard-like and of higher resolution.

Find out more about Focus here.

Technorati Tags: software, mac os x, leopard, spaces, dock, icon, application, clock, desktop

Technorati Tags: photos, editing, gimp, bee

Some of the pictures that cleaned up quite nicely:

Gimp is a software program much like Photoshop, but free (it stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program, and don’t start about explaning GNU). It currently runs under X-windows in Mac OS X, which quite impressively runs smoothly along the rest of the native programs. It contains all the usual photo editing gizmo’s known to Photoshop users, but doesn’t come attached with a steep price tag. If you’re serieus about photo editing, but don’t want to spend ‘another camera’ on software it’s certainly worth looking into. And much better than using illegal copies of Photoshop, in my opinion. The latest version now also has support for ColorSync, but regretfully still doesn’t do CMYK.

Technorati Tags: photos, editing, gimp, x11

Focus shows a gorgeous floating icon of the currently active application with an optional analog or digital clock, and has lots of configuration possibilities.

Version 2.6 finally introduces full Tiger compatbility, is universal, and is Leopard-ready as well. Some issues with multiple-screen situations and with switching between several screens has been solved as well.

Find out more about Focus here.