mcogilvie;61438 said:
Interesting. One of the reasons I don't use Omnifocus is because I find it slow and a little awkward to move around in. Capture is fast because of the little utility program OmniGroup provides, but I think the time to load a web page compares very favorably with the time to load Omnifocus. Of course, I keep Toodledo in a browser tab all the time, just as I would keep Omnifocus open if I still used it. Another consideration is syncing. Omnifocus's sync works fine for me on multiple macs and an iphone, but it is slow. To each his own.
I find OmniFocus to be as fast as can be (I never have to wait on OmniFocus, whereas I have had to wait for a web app to update). Web applications are tied to the speed of your internet connection and their compatibility with your web browser.
I love and use the Opera web browser (which is standards compliant), and many web applications (that are not standards compliant) don't work well in it. OmniFocus always works well for me, and I don't need Google Gears to access it if my internet connection is down.
And for programs that have a OmniFocus plug-in, capturing accurate, delineated data (populated into the fields with a link back to the original) is something no web application can lay claim to. Sure, web apps like Remember The Milk try hard with JavaScript and other APIs, but they pale in comparison with native applications.
For example, I just tried using RTM's Quick Add to add three e-mails (from web mail, as Quick Add doesn't work outside of a web browser) to RTM. Total time: forty seconds, and it added only selected text. In OmniFocus, it took under eight seconds to add three e-mails with the Clippings service speedkey, and each capture automatically transferred to OmniFocus with the message subject as the topic, the body of the e-mail as notes, and it included a link to the e-mail in Apple Mail. Results: less than a fourth of the time, with more data transferred, with a link to the source.
Keep in mind that I am not dismissing web apps like Toodledo, RTM and Nozbe. For web apps, they are amazing. But I find native programs faster, better integrated (with the operating system and other programs - not just a web browser), and more functional overall. Now if the web apps would create (well-designed) native applications that connected with their servers (or native applications added a reliable web interface to synchronized data), that would be very interesting, and worth heavy evaluation. EasyTask Manager is off to a good start in this regard and Appigo Todo (a native iPhone app) connects to Toodledo or RTM and syncs data. So, in the forthcoming months, I will keep an eye on them as they evolve.
Jim