They are pretty much the epitome of "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar".
They even offer their products with a subscription - and I would consider it! They let you purchase your apps for real, they're not forcing anything, and then I think I should support their efforts.
Additionally their licensing is: buy a license, type in your code, your program works. You can use your personal license on all your machines and they trust you.
Last they allow you to save your data to "the cloud", but don't force it. And "the cloud" means you can conveniently store it on their server, or on your own or someone else's webdav server.
On the other hand - their software is incredibly expensive. Let's take Omnifocus...
It's $99 for Omnifocus Pro on Mac. If you want to see your tasks on your iPhone you have to buy the iPhone version separately at $75 (they have blocked users from running Omnifocus iOS on M1 macbooks).
And even after spending over $170 (for what is effectively a gtd task manager), they still ask you to pay $5 a month to access it on the web.
And you might expect it then, to sync with the $199 you spent on their project management software (Omniplan) - but nope!
Then after you have bought the project management software, you might expect that it can export to a common format so you can share it with users that don't use OmniPlan (i.e. Microsoft Project) - but nope! That's a $199 IAP to upgrade to pro (or buy pro upfront).
And after you have bought that $400 project management suite for your Mac do you think you can view THOSE files on your iPhone without buying something extra? Think again! That will be another $99 for the standard version on iOS or $199 please if you want pro.
This feels like what software used to cost before the subscription model became ubiquitous. Their prices are certainly high, but I suspect that range is close to what a "just let me buy a perpetual license" world looks like.
They're priced right. They are unusually expensive, but they know they have a good product.
I've tried many other GTD apps, and I keep going back to OmniFocus. It works well and has been supported for years. In the meantime, many $5 apps I've tried have been abandoned or did the "our incredible journey" flip.
I agree on Omnifocus - it is one of the best, although when I was on OF2 and OF3 got bad reviews I made the switch to Things 3 rather than OF3 and never looked back :)
The one issue I used to have with OF2 was that sometimes I could miss something because of the context filter, which liked to hide to-do's with dependencies or that were set for the future. After moving to Things 3 on reflection I think OF tried to be a little too clever and because of that I didn't have as much confidence in the system as I now have in Things 3.
I did like that it was heavily opinionated though, including things like enforcing weekly reviews for projects.
Why do you feel it’s expensive though? As a software engineer making 100k in the USA it is a couple of hours of work to pay. It will save you a lot more time than that. I’ve paid from my own pocket and used in all companies I worked for ...
It is a good salary but you need to appreciate that in many of the world's megacities - NYC, SF, LDN, SG 100k USD won't even get you a particularly good apartment to rent.
So it's all relative really. Tho yes, it's a fun thought experiment to earn 100k USD while living somewhere in rural Asia where 10$ a day lets you live super well.
100k USD (for one person, non family), depending on your taxes, can get you a reasonable apartment in NYC, perhaps even a fancy place in Brooklyn (and if you're lucky, a good place in Tribeca or the Meatpackers District).
It can get you a pretty mediocre apartment in Central London but who lives there? You'll easily get a comfortable place in Zone 5 or outside for cheaper too, with a better QoL. Parking costs might have to be factored in though.
Singapore, you can literally get an apartment next to MBS in 100k USD - if you like living in a weekend ghost town. If you like to live in a more lively place, I think apart from Sentosa (which is filled with tourists anyways), places like Bukit Timah and Tanjong Pagar are comfortably within your reach. Or you can stay in Jurong where all the expats are, for much cheaper.
The only exception here is San Francisco, where 3k USD pm will get you a cardboard box inside someone else's bedroom, or possibly even bathroom. That's the Bay Area's fault for really shit planning (which, I was surprised, managed to beat London's planning by a mile - in shittiness).
It's amusing for me that you instantly disqualified the idea of living within Central London. It definitely depends on stage of life but being able to walk to work or walk home late at night in Summer is a seriously underrated QoL feature IMO. Tho ofc you don't get outdoor space.
I lived in Central London right until last year. Definitely depends on stage of life, but it's not like London is unlivable for someone making 100k pa.
Also if I wanted to walk to and from work, now I'd rather get a hotel or ABNB and commute like that for a while. It seriously gets old.
Sure it's not unliveable but the original parent was making out like 100k would let you be rich - my point was in the megacities you're not even close.
Also fwiw I've lived 4 years of my life inside zone 1. I think the main downside is air pollution and outdoor space, although you can find garden flats dotted around
Buying Things 3 for iPad ($9.99), iPhone ($19.99) and Mac ($49.99) is half the price of OmniFocus. I actually migrated from Omnifocus 2 to Things 3 and personally think its the better app, but I get that some people might like the bells and whistles.
OmniGraffle is $249.99 USD compared to Sketch at $99. The subscription model cost is roughly the same as Figma (although figma also has a free-forever tier).
Omni Outliner is probably closest compared to OneNote which comes included with any Office 365 plan above $4.00 per month.
OmniPlan is cheaper than Microsoft Project to be fair, although Project for Web is catching up at $10 per month and there are alternatives like QuickPlan at $50.
Full disclosure: Of all these apps, I do REALLY would want to use OmniPlan. It's definitely the best Gantt chart software for Mac but it's useless for me without MSP support, my work aren't going to pay $400, and QuickPlan is $50 and supports Microsoft Project, so I'm not forking out an extra $350 from my own pocket to use it.
That's expected, as it's not a mass-market product, and the niche is small and cluttered with free alternatives.
The amount of people that would buy a 40-50$ app is about the same the buys the 100$ apps now. And turning their apps into 5$-a-piece software is an incredible risk, as it alienates part of their current customer, and the increase in sales might not be enough to offset the lowered per-sale profit. Their position as luxury software is a safe bet.
My only issue with those prices is how hard it is to figure out what your total outlay will be upfront. If you just hear good things about the iOS app and think '$75 seems high, but ok', you'll be very frustrated later when you realize the companion app prices.
Their prices on OF are kinda throwback-y, but the pricing for OmniPlan is probably VERY influenced by how expensive MSP is, or traditionally was.
It's topic drift, but MS Project has done to the critical-path scheduling world what IE did to the browser world. It's worse than the incumbents in lots of material ways, but it's a LOT cheaper and much easier to learn, and so it's sucked up all the oxygen.
I work in enterprise project management / earned value. It USED to be that there were lots of contenders for critical path project management software. Now the last non-MSP product standing is Primavera, and it's somewhat neglected by its new corporate master -- the original owner sold his company to Oracle years ago and Oracle hasn't really done much with it.
So the world at large is, increasingly, stuck with MSP if they want this sort of creature. And MSP, instead of using their position to encourage good practices, or adopt widely-supported features still unaccountably lacking from the product, has instead introduced "features" like Manual Tasks.
What's a Manual Task? It's a task in a schedule that has its dates hardcoded and thus will not move, which is really insanely wrongheaded. A scheduling tool like this is, at a basic level, all about assembling a list of tasks with durations (and, ideally, assigned resources and work and costs) that are connected by a chain of logic. If an early task is delayed 3 weeks, you'll see that in later tasks that depend on the first task.
A "Manual Task" just ignores all that. If this doesn't make immediate sense to you as a horrible idea, let me explain it by way of example. Imagine Excel introduces a feature called Manual Math that allows you to override the rules of arithmetic. If you want the total to say 10,000 but the column has entries that sum to 12,234, just turn on Manual Math!
> What's a Manual Task? It's a task in a schedule that has its dates hardcoded and thus will not move, which is really insanely wrongheaded.
It certainly can be abused, but at the level you have described it, it seems a straightforward way of modeling things outside of the scheduling control of the project.
(Now, if it's allowed to have other tasks as dependencies, and doesn't basically raise a giant red flag if the calculated time of those dependencies pushes past the begin or end of the Manual Task, depending on the kind of dependency, that's a problem with the implementation, but at the level you have described it the concept isn't misplaced.)
On one level, needing to use it is a management smell that control may not have been assigned over all things it should be to effectively manage a project, but that's very much a reality.
> Imagine Excel introduces a feature called Manual Math that allows you to override the rules of arithmetic.
You mean, if excel let you directly enter a value in a cell, even if headings suggest it's a calculation? I'm pretty sure it's has that feature from say one.
> What's a Manual Task? It's a task in a schedule that has its dates hardcoded and thus will not move, which is really insanely wrongheaded. A scheduling tool like this is, at a basic level, all about assembling a list of tasks with durations (and, ideally, assigned resources and work and costs) that are connected by a chain of logic. If an early task is delayed 3 weeks, you'll see that in later tasks that depend on the first task. [...] A "Manual Task" just ignores all that.
That's assuming that all your tasks are movable. If there is a task that can only be completed in a certain time period (and there are some activities that you cannot or will not move in any organisation), you plan around it. It will not move just based on your whims or your schedule.
And yes, it can mean that your auto-schedule makes no sense if something gets delayed and the task causes your critical path scheduling not to make sense any more, but that is the price you pay in the real world.
It's a weird hill to die on.
> Imagine Excel introduces a feature called Manual Math that allows you to override the rules of arithmetic. If you want the total to say 10,000 but the column has entries that sum to 12,234, just turn on Manual Math!
Imagine if someone was able to type in a flat, straight up not calculated number in a calculation spreadsheet, overriding any formula that you have put in. The world would end.
You're thinking of this the wrong way (and, not to put too fine a point on it, NOT in the way project management professionals do).
A critical path project has a chain of tasks. Task A must complete before B which must complete before C, and so forth.
If A is delayed, but you've turned off the critical path engine by making C a "manual task", then C's forecast dates *WILL NOT REFLECT* the anticipated move to the right as a result of A's delay. This is a HUGE problem.
You rely on forecast dates being live, and showing true projections of reality (or as true as possible). You can even seat deadlines, and generate alerts if a task isn't going to meet one. But if you nail something down because it quote-unquote can't slip, you're preventing the software from telling you when a slip is coming.
That is very, very, very dumb.
It's also entirely predictable that someone on HN would try to tell me it isn't.
And yes, you can put literal numbers in spreadsheets. But bad things DO happen when people represent values as sums (or as otherwise calculated based on other values) when they are in fact not. That's what "manual tasks" are.
> What's a Manual Task? It's a task in a schedule that has its dates hardcoded and thus will not move, which is really insanely wrongheaded.
It sounds like a Manual Task is simply a way to acknowledge that your project has a dependency on something in the outside world that is beyond your control, and that seems like a useful feature. Why are you so vehemently opposed to having that capability?
There are other constructs that exist in the project management world to model what you refer to. A "manual task" that appears to be part of the critical path, but is in fact NOT, is a time bomb waiting to go off, because its failure to show real forecast information will absolutely lead the schedulers to think all is well when it's not.
IOW, trust me when I tell you this is a bad idea not grounded in anything like project management best practices.
Ok, so you're just explaining this badly. The problem is not that "manual tasks" exist, but that they can be created with (false) dependencies on other tasks that have flexible scheduling. The way you originally explained Manual Tasks naturally leads to a perfectly valid use case, but apparently MS Project also allows for an invalid usage of that feature.
I'm really not. You're just doing that very-very-HN thing where you assume your surface understanding is sufficient.
Manual tasks in MSP are a very bad idea. There is no valid use case for them in critical path scheduling. They exist because some muzzy-headed marketer at Microsoft decided to insert them into the backlog, near as I can tell, despite the cries of actual professionals who use the tool.
There are ample ways to model constrained tasks in a critical path that do not involve a feature that is, as I said, tantamount to turning off "math" because you don't like what it shows you.
I'm finding it really odd how you are still insisting so vehemently that it's a horrible misfeature, and yet you haven't described what you consider the proper way to represent immovable parts of the schedule, and have barely even acknowledged the need for such a thing. Please, tone down the ranting and try to explain this stuff in a useful way.
> There are ample ways to model constrained tasks in a critical path that do not involve a feature that is, [...]
Can you finish that paragraph in an informative manner?
This is Microsoft that we're talking about, so I don't doubt that they could put in a feature that is as horribly misguided as you claim; I've encountered a few myself. But you've really just been repeating your original assertion without justifying it, and that's unhelpful. Getting haughty about it is even less helpful.
Not to mention the really short support lifecycles. I bought OmniGraffle for iPad for the not insignificant £35 - used a few times - about a year later, on the very next iOS version - it stopped working completely, and the only response they gave to people was "Sucks to be you, buy Omnigraffle 2".
It just sounds like there is a small group of people who are very happy to pay eye-watering amounts of money for (what sounds like at least) really well-crafted productivity software. Good on them for showing there is a market for it
A hundred dollars, that's on the order of one hour of development time. I have never seen those apps and have no idea of how much effort went into them, I don't know how many customers they have, but you probably have to sell a bunch of licenses to cover the development cost and all other costs that went into making those apps.
Before moving to the subscription model, Adobe’s stuff was all in the low hundreds of dollars range too. With a pretty robust set of student discounts, and not a ton of work done to stop people pirating it.
I have tried so many task managers, I have always wanted to try the Omni apps but I am firmly in with windows world and have never found an application or company that seems to compare to the omni group.
I'm an ex-omnifocus user. Omnifocus has lots of bells that make you feel productive, but ultimately I now use Things 3 as it is better designed and also gives me more confidence that things don't get missed (i.e. things can get hidden in a perspective in omnifocus if you aren't careful).
I suspect this is why Omnifocus's latest apps are actually reviewed quite poorly on iOS - 3.8/5 compared to Things 3 at 4.8/5
I'm uncertain if that's what you're implying, but I don't have any affiliation with them.
EDIT: actually, thinking back I did get a discount on their product, LOL. I got onto omnifocus beta free before it came out. When OF 1 came out I got a discount on it. After that I paid for it myself.
But APART from the free 1/2 product I received I have no affiliation with omnigroup. :)
One imagines a scratchy, barely-in-color, distorted-audio film strip from the late 1960s extolling the virtues of "The Omni Group" and its super-villainous schemes to "improve" humanity's e.g. mastication habits.
TOG is a longstanding and well-respected Mac developer.
Their most famous product TODAY is probably OmniFocus, which is (arguably) the top-tier "Getting Things Done" style task management app. I used it for a long time before I switched to OrgMode.
Their 2nd most famous product is probably OmniGraffle, which is sort of a Visio-but-better type thing for Macs.
The Omni Group.
They are pretty much the epitome of "You catch more flies with honey than with vinegar".
They even offer their products with a subscription - and I would consider it! They let you purchase your apps for real, they're not forcing anything, and then I think I should support their efforts.
Additionally their licensing is: buy a license, type in your code, your program works. You can use your personal license on all your machines and they trust you.
Last they allow you to save your data to "the cloud", but don't force it. And "the cloud" means you can conveniently store it on their server, or on your own or someone else's webdav server.
More people should follow their good example.
(and remember, with trust, commerce is unlimited)