I’ve been a Life Balance user for years. I’m not a devoted user but I’ve found it a useful tool in those phases of my life where I felt the need to use an electronic to-do list. The concept behind the application has always just made sense to me, even if using it in practice is not as easy as falling off a log.
I recall that the first time I came across Life Balance, I devoured the Advice Book over lunch at Wendy’s and was excited by the possibilities the application offered. I am pretty sure this was back before there was even a Mac desktop application.
Now there’s finally a major update to the Mac OS X native desktop application. It’s Universal and is supposed to deliver on a lot of long-standing promises, like the addition of AppleScript support. Looking at version 4, it still seems to have its traditional clunky interface, and that’s been a big drawback to me. I simply find it ugly enough that I dread using the desktop application, and the full-featured Palm application feels cramped on my Treo. However, the new version does show some renewed public commitment to the product, which I would have otherwise said was in doubt.
Enter OmniFocus. I have been using it off and on for about a week or two, trying the “vaportrail” sneak peak versions. I’ve been suffering through the daily updates, which are thankfully handled with such great aplomb (probably by the Spark framework) that I hope more applications update themselves the same way in the future.
I love OmniFocus for its native Mac OS X feel. It’s fast, it shares a lot in common with OmniOutliner (which I already use frequently), and it looks like you’d expect a modern Mac OS X application to look. There’s also a good deal on the licensing right now, running until Macworld Expo.
But it still frustrates me. I’m not doing anything complex with OmniFocus, but I keep wishing it was Life Balance. Perhaps it’s because I’m not into the GTD meme; I’ve seen someone say that Life Balance is more Covey-based. But it feels as if Life Balance could do almost anything that OmniFocus could, and yet do more. So I feel that I should look at Life Balance again, especially with the discovery of the new version.
One big Life Balance advantage, from what I have seen so far, is that I can quickly get a flat, prioritized list of what I need to do in any given context. And, I can do that from a hierarchical outline of all of my projects and tasks. I’m having difficultly getting the same output from OmniFocus.
I wish Life Balance would become an application more like OmniFocus, or vice versa. I’d love it if the developers worked together. Sigh.