#Thinking rock vs omnifocus free#

#Thinking rock vs omnifocus free#

Having to be cognizant of where the phone was, relative to the location of the watch, felt counterintuitive, especially considering the Apple Watch’s promise to free the user from their phones. So you can imagine his chagrin being in another room, less than 30 feet away from his iPhone, and finding that the watch was no longer connected. Mind you, Mark lives in a modestly sized apartment. One of his biggest hurdles was having Siri send reminders not to the default To-Do list or calendar, but to OmniFocus instead, which involved working with the cats at Omni (big ups to The Omni Group) who took Mark’s feedback and incorporated them into subsequent builds, which enabled him to hit that ‘sweet spot’.īesides the limitations of the Watch version os most apps, the one thing that drove Mark absolutely bonkers was the fact that if you were outside the range of your iPhone, the Apple Watch was rendered – essentially – useless. He went into excruciating detail about the level of effort required to get OmniFocus to work on the Apple Watch (similar to how he had set it up on the iPhone) and the workflow hacks he needed to have Wink work in a more streamlined fashion than was possible out-the-box. His initial impression was that as another iOS device, it should have been plug-and-play right out of the box. One month later, he felt he had arrived at a place where he could report back. Wink is a smart home app that lets you control connected home appliances from your iPhone.Ĭombined with apps like Shazam, these apps were the apps that factored significantly in Mark’s daily flow and the ones he wanted to test on the Apple Watch.

Remote is the iOS app which allows you to control you iOS devices via your iPhone. OmniFocus ( which I’ve written about before) is a personal task manager that lets you capture thoughts and ideas into lists which you can then parse and organize. There are three (3) primary apps Mark rocks on his iPhone in order of importance: OmniFocus, Remote and Wink.

Mark Hines aka “Yoda” aka “He Who Sees the Future” aka “The Brain” was going to go completely desconstruct the Apple Watch and share his feedback with me.Ī bit of background on his testing is in order. I’ve never been so impressed with it that I took a deep dive to uncover the little kernels of goodness that would covert me into a fan.ĭoesn’t have a heck of a whole lot of utility beyond glances.Īnd as a casual user, I felt that my perspective was uninformed.īut now I had someone who was willing to apply a very scientific approach and take the Apple Watch through it’s paces. You see, I’m a casual user of my Apple Watch. So it was not without a bit of excitement that I handed over my watch, knowing that dude was about to go in on the Apple Watch. The basic issue (beyond cost) was whether the utility of the Apple Watch justified being perpetually monitored.įor him, unless the Apple Watch did something materially better than the iPhone, he wasn’t interested in having Apple (or anyone for that matter) knowing exactly where he was at all times.Īnd he wasn’t one of those always-on-his-phone types, so I knew that not being tracked (or trackable) was not some conspiracy theorist type objection, but a very real objection he had to this always-on culture of today. His wife was contemplating buying him one for his birthday, but he wasn’t quite sure he wanted her to drop that kind of cash for what I had already told him was an expensive toy.

Late last year I let one of my friends borrow my Apple Watch and take it for a test drive.