Follow me on Twitter: @edd
I'm a tinkerer with technology, and occasionally strike lucky with it. I co-chair the O'Reilly Open Source Convention and I'm in charge of designing O'Reilly's conference software platform, Expectnation.
I've written a few computer books, most recently "Learning Rails", in collaboration with my old friend and co-conspirator Simon St.Laurent.
If you've been waiting to get versions of the productivity apps Omnifocus or Nozbe on your iPad, the wait will soon be over.
The makers of Omnifocus report that they are in feature freeze for their iPad app, and are just tuning performance and eliminating crashes.
Meanwhile, Nozbe are set to submit their app to the Apple App Store next week, complete with Evernote integration.
I'm a big fan of Omni Group's OmniFocus productivity software. It caught my eye that they are creating a sync server for it. Right now, I sync my OmniFocus against Mobile Me, so what's the value of a separate sync server?
Put simply, API. The frustration of OmniFocus is that in an age where I can get most of my personal data anywhere on any device, OmniFocus is tethered just to my Mac and iPhone. And in particular, the big missed opportunity is that, although OmniFocus offers an API, it's an AppleScript one that runs only on my laptop.
I wrote to Omni to suggest that, seeing as they're hosting OmniFocus data on their cloud, they could open up a web services API to the data. That way, people wanting to write an Android app, or other clever scripts to manipulate OmniFocus data, could program against that.
There's a large ecosystem out there waiting to blossom around OmniFocus. A web services API would light the touchpaper!
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I use OmniFocus to manage my lists of projects and next actions for GTD. One of the nicest things about OmniFocus is its integration with Apple Mail. If you use the "OmniFocus: Send to Inbox" service, then your new action in OmniFocus is linked with the mail message's URI. One click and you're back in the original email message, no matter which folder you moved it to.
Now, OmniFocus is not really the place to store supporting reference material for projects, so I've been using Evernote for this purpose. What would make the workflow simpler is if Evernote supported opening a note by URI, the same way that Apple Mail does. That way it would be very easy to cross-link supporting material into OmniFocus, and have it accessible with one click.
This may seem like an edge use case, but one of the principles of GTD is that you should have your supporting materials easily to hand when you need them.
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