I’ve been using Todoist for a solid year across all of my devices: Mac, iOS, iPadOS, and Windows. This was after using OmniFocus exclusively since the fall of 2016 (and for many years before that–I even beta tested the first version, excluding forays into both Asana and Things). Last night, while setting up a new machine, I decided to reinstall OmniFocus 4, with the possibility of switching back (I think I am). So this is a good time to consider the differences between them, and ultimately what makes me choose OmniFocus.

Feature	OmniFocus	Todoist
Natural Language Input	No	Yes
Cross-Platform	Web	Yes
Hookmark	Yes	Web only
Defer	Yes	No
Weekly Review	Yes	No
Project Sections	No	Yes
Shortcut Support	Yes	iOS only

Natural Language Input

The one great strength of Todoist–and the feature I miss the most when I don’t use it–is its natural language input. For example, I wanted to be reminded at 4 pm today to text my son to turn on the sous vide machine. I opened Todoist and created a new task like this:

text Aaron today at 4 pm @phone #Home

One line, with autocomplete in the app. It’s fast and great.

Consider the same operation in OmniFocus:

You can type in the meat of the task, but getting those other parameters requires mousing, tabbing, or tapping around in a number of fields. It’s not as fast as Todoist and far more fiddly, especially on iOS.

Defer Dates

The most frequently requested Todoist features on the Todoist Subreddit are defer or start dates. These requests must come from people with demanding jobs, because a good task management app for busy people ideally includes the ability to capture action items that you will need to deal with in the future. That could be in a week, a month, or a year. Defer dates, in OmniFocus, allow you to push off a task or project to a future date, but more importantly, to obscure it from your OmniFocus window until you need to see it.

There are some tricks you can use to achieve a workable version of this on Todoist. Different people have come up with clever workarounds to this missing feature, using tags (“labels” in Todoist), or in my case, moving lists into a folder and using filters to overlook them when I don’t want to see them. It’s fiddly (and fun) to build these workarounds in Todoist, but you never get over the nagging sense that this app/service wouldn’t be elevated by the addition of defer dates.

Cross Platform

Another benefit of Todoist is it’s available on just about every platform: Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, web. OmniFocus is a first-class citizen in the Apple ecosystem, but is only otherwise available on the web. The features are identical on Mac and Windows, but the app really shines on iOS.

But really, Todoist is an example of how cross-platform isn’t necessarily better. Sure, it’s great to have the app running on any OS you want to use. But you’re really just using a web wrapper on Mac or Windows; the experience is identical whether you’re using the Electron version or loading a page in Safari. And on the Mac, Todoist just doesn’t look right.

OmniGroup, the makers of OmniFocus, have been developing for the Mac since the NeXTSTEP days, before that OS became Mac OS. It is, in the truest sense, a Mac-Assed Mac App. OmniFocus feels tightly integrated into the system on macOS, iPadOS, and iOS. It is an example of the benefits of full commitment, of narrowing your options, for the good.

Hookmark

Take Hookmark as an argument for eschewing cross-platform solutions in favor of a tightly integrated app. Hookmark is only available on the Mac, and allows you to link all kinds of data. Integrating Hookmark into your OmniFocus workflow allows you to link emails, documents, and other files to projects or single tasks. Called “Ubiquitous Linking,” it’s best described in its manifesto:

We also recognize that humans work best in psychological flow. Switching contexts, even to search for information, interferes with flow while consuming precious mental capacity, brain energy and time. Activating an aptly-placed link to information is easier and faster than searching for the information — and more protective of flow.

We affirm that the ability to copy a link to a resource is as important for cognitive productivity as the ability to copy other types of information. This applies to all persistent digital information.

Hookmark does work in Todoist… but only in the web interface. And there are some linking affordances available in Windows, but not to the extent that Hookmark enables. It might be the utility I miss the most when using Windows. I don’t want to overstate Hookmark’s utility, as it’s a unique app with a similarly unique feature set, but if you spend some time getting to understand how it works, you will likely find it indispensable.\^1\

Weekly Review

GTD is, on the surface, about collecting to do items, organizing them by project and context, and working from your lists. An essential feature of implementing the method, though, is regularly reviewing your tasks and projects. You can’t effectively do this using only your todo list app, but it’s a central part of the process. Without a proper review, a good app can only help you so much.

There’s nothing about Todoist that prevents you from reviewing, in the GTD sense of the word, your open loops and obligations. It is, however, a manual affair, and you have to sit down and comb through your projects. It is easy, in this instance, to dig into something and tick some action items off your list, but then forget where you left off in Todoist.

This is not the case with OmniFocus, which is the only todo manager I’ve ever used that bakes the weekly review into the app itself. Each week, OmniFocus collects all of your projects–overdue, current, and future–and presents them to you in a pane for you to review. You mark off your progress per project, and there’s no question about where you left off if you get distracted or attend to something else emergent. The review is one of the features I miss most when I’m not using OmniFocus.

Project Sections

Todoist lacks some of OmniFocus’s organizational elan. Most notably, Todoist was designed initially to support one canonical list of projects. You can create one sub level of projects, which is helpful in the way that folders are in organizing projects in OmniFocus, but for anyone who at least splits their projects into “Work” and “Home” categories, you know that you will chafe at Todoist’s limitations here.

A big however, though, are sections in projects in Todoist. You can create phases or stages within a project, and in addition to making these sections meaningful dividers between project subsections, they clean up your projects considerably. Additionally, you can use natural language to assign tasks to sections of projects, and search on sections. OmniFocus has no such affordance, leaving you only the option to create tasks with subtasks to subdivide your projects. Sections are a more attractive and sophisticated feature.

Another neat trick that Todoist offers is to present your sections within a project as a Kanban board. I have tried Trello and never found that particular mode of organizing and viewing my tasks to my taste, but I did enjoy using the feature in Todoist to separate projects into things I can do now (or should do sooner) from things I can wait on. Similarly, it’s a great way to divide up my Car Maintenance project, where each section (or board) corresponds to one of the family vehicles. In this case, I find it helpful to focus on one vehicle at a time. Very flexible, very cool. OmniFocus is stuck in outliner mode at all times.

Shortcut Support

Both Todoist and OmniFocus offer support for Apple’s Shortcuts app/utility, but Todoist shortcuts are not available on the Mac. OmniFocus has a nice collection of shortcuts in the app, and in addition there are hooks in the app that allow you to make some useful shortcuts of your own. This highlights again how Todoist is well integrated on mobile, but a second-class citizen on the Mac.

Speaking of, a cool workflow around OmniFocus and its shortcuts support, in addition to LaunchBar, is using the latter to browse and execute the former. Once you’ve collected some shortcuts, you can browse them using LaunchBar, and fire the shortcut you want.

I was using OmniFocus not so long ago that I could have dug into the Shortcuts support. I’m having a blast with this now, though.

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\^1\ I readily agree that Hookmark support is super-niche, and likely not a consideration for a lot of people comparing the features of these two apps.

On the weekend of Rhonda’s 52nd birthday, which we did indeed celebrate, here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Rosé: I always associated rosé with sweet wine, which maybe it was in the bad-old days. It was, in my mind, on a par with white zinfandel. It’s very popular as a dry white, and after having it myself a number of times, I convinced Rhonda to try the rosé at Bellview after I had it at a celebration of life for a former coworker. Ever since, it’s been our favorite there, and we like to keep a couple of bottles around for jaunts to our local sushi haunt. Speaking of…
2. Ikura Sushi: Kura is a Thai and Japanese restaurant in downtown Vineland. They do a brisk takeout business, but you can almost always walk in and get a table. Which is what we do… often. Me being me, I note what I’m going to order on my phone each night, and then pull up that note so I can vary (or repeat) my order. With most things culinary, I’m adventurous and inclined to try items across the menu, but at Kura, I’m uncharacteristically consistent: gyoza, one small and simple roll, and three orders of sashimi.¹
3. BMX: I was a child of the 80s, and a big part of what boys did in the 80s involved BMX cycling. We all had a cheap dirtbike, and then increasingly expensive freestyle bikes with rotors and pegs and other affordances I wasn’t agile enough to take advantage of. But my last BMX bike was a dead simple Haro BMX race bike: no rotor, back brake only, knobbies. I just rode it and hopped curbs. It was great. Aaron has a very cool SE wheelie bike, with 24″ tires, and some time after he got it, I purchased a 29″ Haro BMX bike for Joe. He’s ridden it like twice, so I take it for a spin from time to time. In a time-honored tradition, Aaron and I rode down to the St. Padre Pio Festival at the same-named church down the street, and brought lunch back (Aaron had an eggplant parm, and Rhonda and I split a porchetta, which is a roast pork sandwich with a long hot pepper and some provolone cheese). I skipped the beer garden, and we scooped up the food and rolled back to the house in style.

¹ There is another placed where I’m boringly repetitive in my dinner order: The Knife and Fork in Atlantic City. I always–always–order the lobster Thermidor. There are a few reasons, including the fact that it’s an uncommon dish, and we don’t go there often.

I almost included watermelon in my Serial Sunday Pro Max post last night. Watermelon is ubiquitous and cheap in southern New Jersey all summer long. I’ve always loved watermelon, but not more so than these last two summers. Last summer, my rowing schedule kept me plenty thirsty, and there is nothing more refreshing when you’re thirsty than watermelon. It’s also low calorie relative to the bulk you can serve yourself, even being careful with your calories: a decent bowl of watermelon won’t even net you 100 calories. I eat watermelon first thing in the morning when I get up, just before rowing and coffee, and eat it throughout the day. I can eat a quarter of a melon in a day when I’m really in the mood.

Sadly, like all great seasonal things, it seems like the supply is drying up locally. Rhonda and I tucked in to Shop Rite and came up empty, and subsequently rolled out to a local farm stand in the hopes of securing one there. Nothing.

I did, however, score a nice small cantaloupe, which I cut up this afternoon. It’s delicious.

It’s iPhone Preorder week! Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. iPhone 16 Pro Max: As the title of this week’s Serial Sunday suggests, I preordered an iPhone 16 Pro Max. I was pretty sure I was gonna skip this version, as there’s nothing earth-shaking with this iPhone rev. My last two iPhones have been the pro model, but the smaller of the two offerrings. I have in fact owned two Max-size phones, and before that, the iPhone 6 Plus. I think I go through a phase where I start to covet the smaller size of other people’s phones, back down to the smaller model, and then miss the battery life of the big phone. It used to be that the Max would get you an additional camera feature, but that’s not true this time, either. I got Desert Titanium.
2. Drawboard PDF Loves Lefties: I wrote about Drawboard here on Uncorrected a couple of months ago. It’s a cross-platform PDF reader that runs great on Windows (notably on ARM Snapdragon chips) and Mac, and I subscribed to it due to its feature set, price, and cross-platform availability. I discovered recently, though, that in addition to renaming the Radial Menu, you can set the new toolbar meant to replace the Radial Menu to the left, bottom, or top of your screen, mimicking the behavior of the drawing palette in OneNote. (Apple Notes does a good job with this handedness-response design, too.)
3. Blistered Shisito Peppers: I’ve had these a few times at different restaurants, and they are always described tantalizingly as some being hot, some being mild. Like one in ten is hot. Rhonda saw this recipe on The Kitchen one day and they came out really good with the additional ingredients.

Simon J. Levien, writing for The New York Times:

Former President Donald J. Trump has gone to great lengths to distance himself from Project 2025, a set of conservative policy proposals for a future Republican administration that has outraged Democrats. He has claimed he knows nothing about it or the people involved in creating it.

“I’m not going to read it,” Mr. Trump said at his first presidential debate against Vice President Kamala Harris. “Everybody knows what I am going to do.”

I don’t think anyone thought he was literally going to read it.

What is Project 2025, and Why is Trump Disavowing It?

I wrote about making this a while back, but we make this dish pretty often. Last night’s effort was a success. I kept the bath at 122 and then charred the steaks up over the charcoal.

1. PasteBar: PasteBar is a cool clipboard manager and snippet utilty for Windows and Mac. You use PasteBar to collect snippets of text and other digital errata and keep in its database. You can organize your snippets using Boards, and create tabs of Boards (say, a coding board, and then a board with vehicle information and part numbers). It’s incredibly flexible. It doesn’t appear to support any kind of keyboard launch for snippets, a la TextExpander or AutoHotKey, which would be a natural fit for an app like this. I don’t see where you can sync across devices, either, but I haven’t dug very deep.

2. PowerToys Workspaces: One of the surprising things about Windows is that, while there are a lot truly bespoke Mac apps in that ecosystem, Windows suffers from a lack of choices. That said, Microsoft adds a lot of features themselves to the OS, obviating the need for some analogous must-have Mac utilities. PowerToys is a perfect example of this; it’s an optional installation of utilities made by the Windows maker, but not installed by default. I’ve sung the praises of PowerToys Run before, but this update adds a workspaces utility handy for multiple display users. I will definitely check this out at the office.

3. Fall: I suppose this should be its own post, but I was outside walking the dogs, pondering a third topic for this weekly listicle I am fond of writing, and it was unmistakable: fall is upon us. It’s been cool all day, but as the sun bows in the west, the air is downright crisp. Fall is paradoxically inviting and foreboding. It signals the end of summer, culturally a time we consider fun and light. But it’s a slow ramp up to the holidays, when its cooler but not cold, and there’s lots of merriment. The colors, the dishes, the waning daylight: these are all things I like about fall. It is, of course, foreboding in that it signals the denouement of another year, another spin on the globe, and the slow roll of winter.¹ The grim steeliness of winter lies just over the crest of the holiday season. Memento Mori, as the Stoics advise.

If you are given to reflecting, fall is hard to resist.

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¹We have, in some sense, licked the problem of winter; we live in hospitable indoor climes and temper the limits of the shorter days with interior delights, be they cooking, watching, reading, or something else. But the memory remains.

I am pedantic enough to insist on the use of “BBQ” or “barbecue” in one cooking situation, and grilling in another. Barbecue connotes low heat, judicious application of smoke, extended cooking times. Grilling, on the other hand, means higher heat and shorter cook times. Here, the smoke flavor comes from the charcoal only. But the lines do blur.

Sunday was baby back ribs, once again, on the Weber Bullet smoker. I used Kingsford briquettes, a bit of rub, and cherry and apple woods. They took about five hours and came out great. I always use the Minion Method for ribs; it’s yielded reliable and delicious results.

Monday found the smoker fired up again, this time sans the water pan. This method, which I’ve also used to great success in making beer can chicken, uses a lot of charcoal to fashion a kind of pit barrel grill. The drums I cooked today took about an hour, and that’s about the same for a whole bird. The smoker only gets up around 325 degrees on a good day, so it still takes some time. Again: very good.

Here’s this week’s list of things to check out:

1. Ulysses: I’ve been trying trying demos of the Mac/iOS/iPadOS since the app debuted on the Mac, but I never pulled the trigger and subscribed. It’s a great example of a Markdown-based text editor, although Ulysses has some notable differences from the likes of iA Writer, what might be considered its closest analog. I don’t need or want Ulysses for much of its feature set, though; I prefer individual text files to a database exclusive to the app for this kind of writing. It does, however, have great WordPress support, even allowing you to include images in a post. I’m writing this installment of Sunday Serial in Ulysses in fact, and will likely publish it from here as well. I prefer iA Writer or even BBEdit to it on the Mac, but even there, I have to move everything over to MarsEdit (a great application in its own right, but not one I like to write in). Ulysses nicely unifies posting to WordPress when I’m using my iPad.
2. American Philosophy: A Love Letter: I mentioned this book mid-last-week in talking about John Kaag’s _Hiking with Nietzsche._I’m really ignorant about American philosophy.
3. AppyHour: Rhonda signed up for this app-delivery service a while ago. We both agree that we’ve enjoyed trying things we wouldn’t have otherwise chosen at a store. The Prosecco jam in this last box is gooooood.

Rhonda and I found ourselves temporarily in an empty nest last night, so after Brie and rosé at Bellview, we ducked into around-the-corner Greenview Inn. I hadn’t really ever looked at the “from the grill” section of the menu, but you can order a number of meat and fish selections, choose a sauce, and add an a la carte veg to go along with it. And I figured with sauces being hard to calorie track, why not try something chock full of protein? So I ordered the veal chop with some salt and pepper, and a wedge of lemon to add some zing. Twas good.