Take this morning on my regular cycling to work. I’ve wanted to test the quality of the 4th gen iPod Touch’ camera.

I’ve found out about GTD around 2008 and tempted to try it out, I’ve checked what Macs apps are available for that. Technically not all these apps are 100% GTD but more on the ‘task management’ side.

After a short research I picked OmniFocus at the beginning of 2009. Since I don’t follow all GTD rules, I used is mostly as a “glorified to do list”, installed on the laptop only. I added a couple of tasks and projects and started to tick them off. It had recurrent tasks (which were used to keep track of my haircut schedule), folders/projects (to store lists of appliances/gadgets to buy or the debts like the car loan).

When Andy from Potion Factory launched the first beta of The Hit List, I gave that a try too. I preferred the UI design to OmniFocus’ one. It also had folders/projects and recurrent tasks. It even came up with a setup project meant to showcase the best of it. On the preferences pane it has a tab called iPhone Sync – coming soon. One of my reasons was the hope that the iPhone client would come soon enough (2–4 months) and it would cost less then OmniFocus for iPhone (was hoping for $10). As of today, there is no iPhone app (and no news about it).

In this period of time there was another application available: Things (from Cultured Code). The couple of times when I checked it, it lacked recurrent task and a way to make tasks available only from a certain date on. It didn’t manage to convince me to switch away from THL then. But because THL for iPhone is still in development, about a week ago I decided to give Things another try. Recurrent tasks look nice enough and there is a way to add tasks that are visible only from a certain date on. The prices of the iPhone/iPad apps are in the ranges I’m willing to pay. I got used to the way Things handles tasks (vs THL) and the future looks promising. I’ll give Things a try until the end of August.

I don’t want to complain about Andy’s silence period. He’s a one man indie shop and that makes it easy to throw his work schedule of the track. After all, on my screensaver project things are not moving as fast as I’d like to.

Since it was somewhat clear for me that I should replace THL, I tried to get back to OmniFocus, but I can’t get used to its user interface and work flow.

What I’ve learned from this story is that I should not buy a product based on the promises of “coming soon”. Probably I’d be much happier if I have had paid $20 for OmniFocus for iPhone and use it on a second device for about one year instead of being cheap and switching to The Hit List and now to Things. On the other hand, I really enjoyed these later two programs.

For other interested persons, I’ve attached a comparison screenshot with my pet peeve, recurrent tasks.

Speaking of user interfaces, I have found Apple’s secret sauce. They always give more then 100% when working on a product or program. The proof is in the attached screenshot.

/Irony.

I was trying to open all the history links from mobile.de, browsed Saturday. As a side note neither Mac OSX nor Firefox crashed after that, and I managed to visit those pages again (and close them again, one by one).

I’ve noticed that starting with a couple of days ago, the iMac doesn’t want to go to sleep anymore. If I go to Apple menu then Sleep, it tries to go to sleep, but after the hard disk stops spinning, it wakes up again.

After carefully inspecting the Console logs I’ve come up with the following messages:

Feb  8 20:32:17 ... kernel[0]: hibernate_write_image done(0)
Feb  8 20:32:17 ... kernel[0]: sleep
Feb  8 20:32:17 ... kernel[0]: Wake reason = 
Feb  8 20:32:17 ... kernel[0]: System Wake
Feb  8 20:32:17 ... kernel[0]: Previous Sleep Cause: 5

What’s particularly strange is the empty “Wake reason = ” message after sleep. Usually, there you can see different messages like “Wake reason = OHC1”, when you wake the Mac by pressing a key on the USB keyboard.

After removing some innocent Extensions (Remote Buddy and CoolBook2—this one ended up here when I’ve migrated the data from the laptop), I’ve found out the root cause.

In my case, it was the wireless network’s fault. I already have a regular network cable between the Time Capsule and the iMac, but I also have a wireless network for the mobile devices. For some reason, I’ve activated the wireless network on the iMac. This caused the computer to wake up from sleep immediately, but no “Wake reason” was given.

In case your computer doesn’t want to go to sleep too, try this.