Life Balance - 4.1

An upgrade to Life Balance is a rare event indeed, as many faithful long-time users have grown tired of complaining (and not just for the sake of it, as suggested below, but because of the app’s all too evident shortcomings). But, folks, adding Apple Scripting, Spotlight searching and a few minor interface tweaks is really not a true upgrade. In fact, it looks very much like the evasion of an upgrade, simply throwing the task of improvement back on the user. It’s also hard not to see the timing as a rather feeble response to the first truly serious alternative to LB: the Omni Group‘s superb new OmniFocus.

It’s great that there are still users who are delighted with LB. Power to you and read no further. From long ago when I began using it I too remember it as a stimulation to thinking through priorities and getting aspects of life, well, into balance. The pie-chart and the automatic shifting of priorities among tasks to reflect goals was an attractive idea. But in daily use, when the pie chart fades very much into the background and you want to get on with the practical business of organizing your time and projects, I - like many other users - became increasingly frustrated with the app’s truly dreadful, utterly un-Mac-like, interface, its awkward data entry, its quirky decisions about priorities, the difficulty of tweaking the order of tasks once the app had decided their order, and the persistent refusal of the developers to fix any of these obvious problems despite growing annoyance among users.

What kept me with it was the lack of alternatives. There are many to-do list apps around, but none that allow this degree of project planning (short of the massive overkill of large project management apps aimed at multi-person situations). Now, however, there is, and it’s a cracker: OmniFocus. If you share these frustrations with LB, do yourself a favour and check it out. It is superb, elegant, flexible, intuitive, cleanly designed, a joy to use - everything that LB could be, but isn’t. All it lacks compared with LB is the overt emphasis on self-help introspection - the pie-chart, etc. But in fact it serves this function perfectly, too.

If you truly need your computer to let you know when you should be setting aside your work to spend time on some other aspect of your life, and don’t have problems with the interface, then stick with LB. Otherwise you owe it to yourself to check out OmniFocus, especially as it is on offer at half price in beta. When it’s released in January it will cost the same as LB.