iPhone Task Management: Life Balance vs. OmniFocus

Mobile task management supplies much of my oxygen. By 2006 I had fallen in love with Life Balance on various Palm Treos. But when I got my iPhone 3G in 2008, Life Balance wasn't available and I had to go with
OmniFocus.

Recently I discovered Life Balance is available for the iPhone. So I decided to give it a try. I've also used both OmniFocus and Life Balance in conjunction with their desktop clients.

So far, Life Balance iPhone is a fleeter application than OmniFocus, and every bit as powerful. The interface isn't as polished as OmniFocus', but that's not the need. Easy, rapid, and dependable task management is the need.

OmniFocus is a very handsome product with a clean user interface. One thing OmniGroup does better than nearly anybody is handsome user interfaces. Also OmniFocus seems to use only UIKit components and will likely scale to the iPad like a charm.

Except, lately OmniFocus has been taking a long time to load on my iPhone. I'm an itinerant project management professional and I frequently find myself rotating through email, phone, web, calendar, and OmniFocus. The long OF load times were becoming a drag.

Also, OmniFocus always struck me as too complicated. I practice a strict GTD approach. Life Balance had always complimented that because it had a very simple data type: the task.

Life Balance projects are just tasks that have tasks under them. It basically requires two user interface panes: A tree of nested tasks and an edit pane for any one task.

Omni Focus complicates the situation with 'project' as a separate data type. It might seem minor. And really both applications offer nearly the same thing: a view of tasks by project, a view of tasks by context, and edit panes. But in Life Balance a project is just a task with a triangle to open it to a list of subtasks. In OmniFocus the user interface has a whole other bar and edit interface for projects, making them (needlessly) distinct from tasks.

Surprise, the more parsimonious data type means both a project/task list and a task detail edit pane can be open at the same time in Life Balance. This makes the desktop client simpler than OmniFocus'.

That said, the Mac desktop Life Balance is more Windows '95 than it is even Windows XP. Also I've read that the initial Life Balance iPhone app was buggy. However, I've been using v.1.6 for weeks and it's been stable, snappy.

Life Balance has a great thing going on. I use Dropbox and wireless iPhone sync to coordinate my data across a MacBook, ASUS netbook, and iPhone. Wherever I am, I can jump in and get things done on my projects using Life Balance.