Apple : Buying Guide: 6 best productivity tools for Mac OS X |
| Buying Guide: 6 best productivity tools for Mac OS X Posted: 14 Jul 2011 02:30 AM PDT  Long ago a wise man once said: "You can't manage time, you can only manage what you do with it," and almost since the first computer we have been looking to digital solutions to help us decide what to do and when. Modern personal productivity applications aim to help you do exactly this. Any good personal productivity application should let you capture, organise and complete tasks that you need to do. It's important to understand that they aren't project management apps. Although they should let you group tasks into projects, they aren't focused on project planning or resource allocation. The only resource they work on is your time, not anyone else's. And they need to do this as quickly, seamlessly and easily as possible: if you have to spend lots of time trying to make your system work, it's almost not worth having. In this test, we've picked six of the best productivity applications around. Each takes a different approach to helping you stay on top of things, but all aim to help you capture, process and act upon actions in a way that makes life easier. And that's the key to how such products should work: they must be flexible so as to work with whatever task management system you choose, without forcing you to spend hours tweaking them. Software on test Firetask - £30 Test one: Ease of use
With personal apps like these, 'ease of use' is always going to be a little relative, as it depends on the kind of system you're using to manage your tasks. But in all cases, they need to be quick and easy to get to grips with. Most apps here use a similar starting point, with an Inbox for new, unprocessed to-dos, projects and categories (also called contexts) for grouping tasks, and dates for when something is due. TaskSurfer, Things and Firetask have similar interfaces, with options on the left that let you select projects, to-dos that are due today, and so on. Onlytasks is similar, but refers to projects as 'Notebooks', while OmniFocus splits 'Contexts' out from projects. TaskPaper takes a much simpler approach, with simple lists organised using tags. Firetask is probably quickest to get to grips with. Creating projects is easy, and the 'Today' option is excellent, listing both next actions and whatever's due.
Test two: Features
Feature-wise, OmniFocus is probably the stand-out product: with a little time, there's very little that you can't get it to do. Tasks can have a context attached (the physical context you need to do the task in - for example, a computer). They can have due dates, estimations of the time they'll take, and notes. Projects can be linear - so you have to complete step one to go on to step two - or parallel, where you can 'park' one step and go on to another. The features, and options, are endless. None of the other products come close in terms of features, though, to be fair, they attempt to focus on a more limited set of features implemented in a way that's easy to use. TaskPaper focuses on lists, with the power of a tagging system. An honourable mention goes to TaskSurfer for its 'Smart Folders', which let you set up live searches - almost matching OmniFocus's power - and its ability to use OS X's Core Location feature to geo-locate tasks.
Test three: Syncing
Personal productivity systems must be with you even when you're not in front of your Mac, so synchronising tasks - either to a website, other Macs, or an iOS device - is very important. All of the applications except Onlytasks and TaskSurfer have dedicated iOS companion software, which can synchronise directly over your Wi-Fi network. OmniFocus and TaskPaper can also sync over the internet (via a service called SimpleNote in TaskPaper's case), and this is also being planned for both Things and Firetask in the future. Onlytasks and TaskSurfer use third-party online services, both of which allow their tasks to be edited through a web browser. Onlytasks uses Evernote, a popular notetaking service, while TaskSurfer uses the excellent ToodleDo online task-management system. Both Evernote and ToodleDo have iOS apps, effectively giving these packages iOS clients too.
Test four: Managing projects
Although none of these apps should be considered full-blown project management packages, the ability to create and organise projects is a core part of the functionality of any task-management software. Projects come in many guises, some of which have to be completed step-by-step (linear projects), while others can be completed in any order. OmniFocus offers the widest range of project types, including a type that is simply a collection of to-dos that can be completed in any order. This is also the default project type in Things, while Firetask lets you quickly see either only the top action in a project or all of them - giving both project types in one. Onlytasks and TaskSurfer use different terminology for projects (notebooks and folders). TaskPaper's projects are simple sub-lists in your main document, but its broad tagging system compensates for this by allowing you to customise what you see.
The best productivity tool for OS X is...
These are personal pieces of software, which makes it very hard to name a single winner. Everyone's approach to managing tasks is different enough to make it worth your while trying out at least one or two different packages to see which one suits. We've whittled it down to a choice of three products: OmniFocus, Firetask and Things. OmniFocus is the 'big beast' of task managers. There's almost nothing you can't do with it, if you're prepared to tinker to make it work for you. Things combines a powerful tagging system with a great look and feel. But our final winner is Firetask. It's nicely designed, and anyone that's new to task management should get to grips with it in minutes. It's also powerful and has a trusted system.
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