I’ve been using the project manager in Entourage to manage the class I teach. It helps–quite a lot–and its integration with Word is very nice for replying to students. However, it does have some holes in it.
How does Omnifocus compare with this? I don’t need or want a full project manager. But I do need something that will bring emails, files, calendar, etc together in one place and then reach out to Word (or some wp which is Word compatible) to grade papers and then email them back.
I know this isn’t a Scrivener topic, per se, but I’ve found the people on this forum to be the most helpful group I’ve ever encountered on the web. I hope you don’t mind me coming back to you with this question.
Also, how would Omnifocus work with book development? Does it apply at all. I’ve no use for Entourage in this regard, but maybe I just don’t know how to use it.
It is not really meant to replace something like Entourage, nor is it a dedicated project planner, that would be OmniPlan, which one day will have integration with OmniFocus. The latter is a tool for the type of person that has a lot of things going on at once, and needs to keep track of them all simultaneously. If you are responsible for many dozens of projects (and that can include everything from home improvement to coding a module for a web site), and potentially thousands of individual steps within those projects, spread out amongst them all—then OmniFocus is great.
While it does allow you to attach files, it probably isn’t going to be the best “hub” you’ve ever come across. It is really more focussed on people that generate and check off lots of tasks in a week.
The beta is free and allows full usage, so you might as well download it and give it a try. If you’ve ever used an outliner of any kind before, you’ll probably find it pretty simple to use—but there is no documentation as of yet.
I’m somewhat surprised to find myself recommending this, but you might give Midnight Inbox a try. It automatically gathers information from all over the place (you define rules for its collection), and you might be able to make it work for you.
I’ve never really played around with it much (it’s far too structured for my taste), but it might be worth looking into. It’s a lot closer to what you’re looking for than OmniFocus at the very least, I suspect.
Journler is a good suggestion. Even though it is primarily meant to be a daily diary, it does have things like due dates, completion status, and is a nice media hub. Mail can be dropped right into an entry, and you can later search on the From and To fields and so forth. Just about the only major drawback I can think of is that media cannot be assigned meta-data, but if you keep media to one per entry, or make an entry an “index” of contained media, that is essentially moot.
One other thing, if you are on Leopard, go to the Journler forums and download the beta version. In fact, do that anyway. Stability is good in my experience, and it has a better set of features than current stable.
Stability is good in my experience, and it has a better set of features than current stable.