marlyse.comme, myself and my life
Sunday, October 15, 2006
Want to move on from LifeBalance ?
Then you might want to look at the combination of Kinkless GTD and OmniOutlinerPro. And a nice review on how to integrate it with iCal you can find at 43folders.com which could help you combine the three easily.
As some other, long time fans of LifeBalance, I am getting really tired of them not updating and for years promising direct integration with iCal but they still haven’t managed to do so whereas many other newcomers shake their sleeves and there it is - direct sync with iCal (take Kinkless GTD for example).
It won’t take much longer and I am tired enough of LifeBalance to toss it and to switch.
There are also several other options : If you are on a PC - or a newer Intel Mac with Parallel installed - you might get My Life Organized and be happy with that (it seems to be a matured version of LifeBalance or the GTD [Getting Things Done] principal in general) or if you want to wetten your feet with a GTD application but don’t want to shell out money you can try ThinkingRock which works on a Mac (a bit slow as it’s solely based on Java as it seems) - or - if you use Gmail and FireFox (the only good [free] browser after Safari :-) you can even use GTGGmail which is a great feature if you do use Gmail in the webbrowser!
One of the main reasons I did not instantly switch to Kinkless GTD and the OmniOutliner solution is the fact that Kinkless GTD does miss a few features which are crucial for me : EVENTS => tasks not by due date but by calendar. Big difference. Though nowadays you can just drag&drop todo’s in iCal from the todo panel into the event panel and the todo remains as a todo in that list (quite similar as in LifeBalance). Next to that it doesn’t seem simple to create repeating tasks or a task by calendar and then repeat that (will be treated differently in LifeBalance). These things have made my life with tasks much easier. I also like the assignments of level of effort it takes to complete the tasks and even though I barely use the pie chart of LifeBalance I have planned and organized with that in mind. And there will be of course some additional, other re-adjustments needed if I truly want to switch.
So I’ll go a bit longer through the hoops of the horrible sync process : LifeBalance =’> PDA then iCal Events < ='> PDA then iCal Tasks < ='> PDA (yes, needs to be done separately or else iCal will report each time sync errors) then in LifeBalance on PDA link events from calendar then LifeBalance < ='> PDA. After that you should have all the relevant data in both applications. Not pretty to do on a regular basis.
To top it all off, since about 6 months I completely omit the last step because I had severe data messup since an update of The Missing Sync which could not get resolved and I lost days of trying to fix the issue (including emails with both developers) and now I don’t even have the nerves to try again and see if it got fixed to the point that I can trust it again. Now, I just have it set that LifeBalance on the Mac overrides the PDA and only iCal is 2-way sync. [this has LifeBalance merge on the PDA with the calendar and then iCal reads this merged data]. I end up with all the data in iCal but not all in LifeBalance. I’ve changed so far that LifeBalance is used for my day-to-day “little stuff” with all the repeating events and trying to plan the day and week etc. and in iCal I have all the “important” events like doctors appointments or meetings with a client.
Gives me some double-work to be able to work logically in LifeBalance due to missing events, but LifeBalance is a good container for all these random thoughts of “oh, I wanted to do this and that” and with all it’s drawbacks still better than to only using iCal because trying to use a slew of tasks in iCal’s todo section is a horrendous undertaking [i.e. one long list and hard to find stuff and no good option of organizing the data) and plain not feasable with the millions of tasks I’ve splattered around in my universe.
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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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