Apple vs. Palm vs. Windows Mobile vs. Franklin Planner and a little IIS7

INTRO

After years of using my trusty Franklin planner, I decided to switch to a PDA a few years ago to keep my schedule/contacts/todos because quite frankly (excuse the pun!) I got tired of lugging around my 5lb. organizer with me everywhere. After trying an HP iPaq 5550 (WM2003), a Dell x50v (WM5), a Dell x51v (WM6-Football), I finally settled on a Palm TX. Why? Well, because Windows Mobile really just worked too slow for me. I was looking for something that was instant-on and could take notes quickly. While all the bells and whistles of Windows Mobile 6 were great, it really didn't work well. Call it personal preference, but coming from a Franklin planner, the Palm TX with Agendus Pro really just worked well. The only thing I didn't like was that at the same time, I switched from Windows Vista to Mac OSX for my primary laptop and it just didn't sync right until I got MarkSpace's Missing Sync. Well, my Palm TX finally gave out, although I will admit that it was my fault for breaking the screen on it. After checking the usual places for a screen replacement (which I did twice before on a Dell x50v and x51v), I decided to try using the Apple alternative as my PDA. It made sense to me because even Palm has pretty much given up on the PalmOS, opting for Windows Mobile on their new devices, and I had already pretty much made up my mind on Mac OSX as my main OS for home. I can hear all my PC friends sighing and scratching their heads already, but really, Mac OSX works the way I want and still allows me to use Windows and all the Unix/Linux tools I need under BootCamp/VMWare Fusion. Incidentally, I did try it the other way around using a Win XP machine with VMWare workstation running Mac OSX86, but I found myself spending more and more time in Mac OS anyways, and for some reason, the virtualization of OSX86 tended to run somewhat poorly on my laptop!

FIRST THOUGHTS

Well, after plopping my $$$'s down for an iPod Touch, I have to say that I was really impressed when my wife picked it up and pretty much took to it right away. For those that don't know my wife, she is not technology-savvy and has the "special gift" of causing gadgets to stop working by just touching them! 

After using it for about a week, I really like the interface. Mail works the way it's supposed to, syncs with my Gmail account through IMAP, the pop server from my restaurant website, and even the Exchange server at my house. Best of all, it pulled all the settings for these from my Mac, meaning that I didn't even have to configure it! The app store has plenty of free apps that were able to replace all the cool gadgets that I had on my Windows Mobile devices, and even had a VNC client that I could use to remote control my Mac and Linux machines! 

The only real disappointment came when I tried to sync my todo list which I keep in iCal on my MacBook Pro and found out that THERE'S NO SUPPORT FOR TO DOS! Apple's solution is to store them on an IMAP server and pull them as part of mail! Huh? Yes, you read that right NO TO DOS on iPhone/iPod Touch. Although the app store has a lot of to-do programs, most of them don't sync with iCal which is how I'd pretty much setup everything which left me with only three options. The first was an app called "Things" which although did sync with iCal, only synced one calendar which is a problem for me because I like to categorize my to dos into multiple calendars on iCal, so that one was pretty much out. The second option was to go back to using my Franklin planner which as mentioned before was over 5lbs. and was already getting unwieldly when I ditched it a few years back. The third was another app called "OmniFocus", which is what I finally settled on. 

OMNIFOCUS

One thing that seems to be a big trend amongst all the new productivity apps is the adoption of David Allen's "Getting Things Done" approach to doing things which is quite different from the Stephen Covey approach of "Big Rocks First". What really kind of got me hooked on OmniFocus was the integration with other Mac apps like Mail where with a hot-key I could quickly add things to my to do list. A quick press of CTRL-OPT-ENTER on a mail item brings up a quick add toolbar where I can quickly add a context , project, and time estimate to handling that mail item. 

NOTHING'S PREFECT (I mean "PERFECT")

There's two drawbacks of using OmniFocus, one technical, one procedural. I'm used to grouping things in "Urgent/Important", "Important", "Urgent", "Everything Else" using the Stephen Covey method. Using the "Getting Things Done" method requires a retraining of my brain to look at things in terms of "Projects" and "Contexts". That said, OmniFocus does add the ability to "Flag" things which I used to add the dimension of importance, meaning that I could still get the same Franklin-style data, but just in a different way which required me to think a little differently. The second, more important drawback is with the sync to iPhone/iPod Touch which requires either a MobileMe or WebDAV server to handle synchronization. MobileMe didn't make much sense to me since all my stuff is backed up through Plaxo for Mac (which is why I was reluctant to give up iCal as my to do list). This left WebDAV as my best option since I figured I could just enable WebDAV on my IIS7 box at home to handle everything. WRONG! As it turns out, the version of WebDAV isn't quite feature complete, sort of. Microsoft's implementation of WebDAV requires an MSI package download from Microsoft as an add-on. The unfortunate part is that for some reason, they didn't implement WebDAV locks which apparently Apple decided it needs in order to write files back to the WebDAV published share. It seems that the locking functionality isn't part of the original WebDAV RFC, so Microsoft in their haste to bring Windows Server 2008 to market, decided to drop that "feature" from their first release of WebDAV! Refusing to be beat, I remembered that Mac OSX had Apache built-in. Five minutes of tinkering with Apache's configuration files and I had a WebDAV server that did support locking and OmniFocus had what it needed to sync with my iPod Touch!

FINAL THOUGHTS

After two weeks with my iPod Touch, I'm really pleased with the user interface experience. As mentioned before, my wife really took to it and could figure out pretty much everything. I really like the Mac-like look and feel and Safari really rocks and is infinitely more usable than Blazer on Palm OS! Not to mention all the great apps like FaceBook, LinkedIn, PageOnce, and others. The most interesting tech that fascinates me is the WiFi based locator technology. I've tried it at various places around the city and it seems to be pretty accurate. Or at least accurate enough to utilize all the location-based apps like Maps and AroundMe! I'm still getting used to the "GTD" way of managing to dos and am hoping that better integration between OmniFocus and iPhone/iPod Touch using BonJour comes pretty soon, but overall, I'm pretty happy with my iPod Touch as a PDA! Now if only I could sync iTunes using WiFi instead of a cable, I'll be set!