marlyse.comme, myself and my life
Friday, July 29, 2005
Love-Hate
There are pieces of software which definitely fall under this category. They are great ideas, working in some areas just perfectly and are exactly what you want and/or need but in other areas they are lacking, sometimes to such an extent that in the end there is more effort involved in using them then not.
Such emotional battles I’ve been fighting on and off with iBiz which used to be called iWork- nowadays I only use it to create my invoices and estimates for clients, but all the time tracking I continue doing via the very useful utility TimeLog (then, at the end I import the data into iBiz and clean it up to my liking and send the invoice). Another such love-hate relationship I have with Life Balance.
It’s at least the 3rd time I am working with the demo, the last time was probably a year ago. I really like the concept (dynamically estimated importance of to-do’s and hiding of reoccurring such items until they need to be again into your face) and the ability to use it on the Mac and on the Palm, plus getting the to-do’s into iCal are the magnets of this application.
The 2 major drawbacks is that within 2 weeks
a) I lost already 3 times all data on the Palm due to the data-file going corrupt when switching from either the calendar or the (Tungsten T5) built-in Task list to LifeBalance. I’ll suddenly end-up with only the last two items, all other, everything, is gone. As I have an automated backup every screaming early morning, I can revert to this latest data quite easily, but there is still loss of data, for example all of yesterday - the corruption occurred at 1 AM - so 16 hours of new data got lost. And even though all to-do items have a LB number in their notes, the data does not get recognized as missing in LB and thus not re-read into LB after such a crash.
b) Have several times cleaned up double entries which I get in iCal - mostly after such a crash of course. But the syncing is not direct, it always needs to sync 2x to get truly synced between all 3 applications and iCal is really limited here, it can place new items from the Palm only into ONE selected category on the desktop. This doesn’t make sense at all, even PalmDesktop can handle multiple categories, but this drawback from iCal requires then a lot of manual re-organizing until all 3 locations truly sync. But at least The Missing Sync for Palm is helpful here, I can select to only sync one application, so this goes quite fast, even with the need to sync 2x.
Then of course there are small quirks which one gets with all software, here things like on the Palm it is really easy to move a parent group by mistake into some other group. Or the balanced pie result doesn’t make sense, the constant recurring items have like zero importance, but they still get weighted way too much in the final balance.
Of course I could go now onto their website and study all the forums and/or report bugs and get involved. But this is then when a utility to help streamline life becomes more of a nuisance as it becomes time consuming to report and track down bugs etc. and - new to me - I am not really interested anymore in going down that avenue, there are other things in my life which have more priority. I’ve been alpha and beta testing software years away from my life (since about 1995), and now I am not interested anymore - with a few exceptions; then I will give feedback and mostly, yes mostly, all coders I’ve come across are very interested in improving their software and as long as I explain coherent what happens when etc., solutions have been found. But it takes time, and one of the reasons I am considering once again of buying LifeBalance is that it punches me in the face with all the other fishes I have to fry instead of doing what is more important.
I still have about 10 days to evaluate and to decide. I might take a trip onto their forum after all, that might help the final decision. But how can we get Apple to incorporate true syncing of calendars and categories between the Palm and the desktop?
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It had to be said….Today I wrote an email to support of Llamagraphics, the home of LifeBalance. Not much more to add to this, especially not after seeing the dedication the coders put into iGTD and OmniFocus and how well those 2 applications are coming along.I am one o…
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