Moving LifeBalance forward
I first used and paid for LifeBalance on the Newton and eventually on the Palm and Mac versions, so I've been around the program for a long time. The core concept that your priorities should drive what you do, and that your priorities should be broader than just your work and busy stuff is what first appealed to me about LB and what keeps me coming back to it. The personal touch and family feel provided by Catherine and the others at Llamagraphics also have a strong appeal and have earned much loyalty from me.
The last few years has seen the rise of the GTD philosophy and a bunch of Mac apps built around the GTD process, but I ignored them all because I felt like they were ripping of LB. GTD and the LB philosophy are pretty similar, although I know LB came around first. To me, the main difference is that the point of GTD's system is to let you focus on the task at hand, but you decide what to focus on (somewhat driven by the context concept). LB tries to nudge your focus for you, based on your priorities.
The last paid version of LB I have is 3.x, but I've looked at 4.x and 5.x and never saw enough improvements in the areas I have problems with to convince myself to upgrade. Frankly, I haven't seen much significant change in LB since the first Mac OS X version and and the UI changes since the Newton and Palm versions is scarily small considering how much time has passed. Because of this, I recently took a look at a number of the GTD apps to see if any of those was good enough to switch to.
After trying and reading a ton on many GTD apps, my thoughts are:
- LifeBalance needs a serious GUI and usability update to bring it up to modern Mac OS visual standards and to make it easier to use.
- I still like the LB philosophy of nudging your towards your priorities better than the GTD concept, but I think LB can learn some things from GTD as well.
After looking at so many programs, my ideal app would be:
- the core of LB's priority setting functionality
- the beautiful user interface of Things [see how they expand the view of an action item to change settings right on the item without tabs or inspector panels]
- the collection capability of Midnight Inbox where it scans your email, iCal, folders, etc. for new items that should be turned into and connected to an action item.
- the capture items anywhere to an inbox to be sorted later of OmniFocus and many of the other GTD apps
- the multiple views on the same dataset of OmniFocus
- the quick keyboard navigation, tagging, and natural language parsing of The Hit List
- the tagging capability of nearly all the GTD apps
- easier ways to set relative priorities between different projects at the same level of the outline without all the clicking back and forth
My question to the folks at Llamagraphics is: Will LB ever get a serious rewrite to modernize its user interface and make user workflow easier and smoother?
If so, can we open a more detailed discussion of how to improve LB? I think LB has the opportunity to grow significantly but it needs a modern face and functionality to do it.
I wholeheartedly agree with
I wholeheartedly agree with the essence of collinong post.
I believe that Life Balance is based on the right principles, but it has not evolved in the last few years, and one can see it clearly.
I'm especially referring to the UI and the interaction of the application, although some of the feature suggested in the post would be also interested to consider.
A few examples:
- The note field is not useful in it's current format. It doesn't allow to add links to URLs and files, it doesn't show up until you get into the note pane of the task details.
- Different aspects of task details are in different panes, which makes cumbersome and slow to set up new tasks and easy to forget to specify some aspects of it.
- The balance screen, which is awkward to use. In particular:
- the dragging of the pie slices is awkward
- the fact that you can't see the percentage allocations of all the areas at the same time is awkward
- the fact that you can't drill down into goals to verify the priorities of subtasks
Also, I think that the updates cost too much for the extent of the changes.
Setting pie slice percentages
Pavesina wrote, "the dragging of the pie slices is awkward."
What I would like to see improved is the ability to fix a slice at a certain percentage while changing the others. For example, if I set one TLI at 20%, and then change another, the first TLI will no longer be at 20%. It takes quite a bit of fussing to get everything just right. An option to input the percentages as numbers would be terrific.
Suggestion seconded!
This is a very needed simple feature indeed - each pie slice should show a checkbox allowing you to 'lock' that slice. Inputting a chain of numbers to set the pie in one operation would also work wonders.
Slice locking!
I like this suggestion.
Slice locking and being able to enter percentages would definitely solve all my problems with the goal allocation pie.
I still think that manual resizing should be the main way of interacting with the pie.
Many, nearly all of our updates have been free
Right... thanks for that. However, I would like to clear up a serious misperception.
Many, nearly all, of our updates in the past, have been free. (Not that we promise always to do that.) :-)
You should definitely look carefully at all the release notes.
http://www.llamagraphics.com/LB/MergedReleaseNotes.php
We have charged for one Mac upgrade - the upgrade from version 3 to 4. That version included iCal Sync, Applescript and Automator support, included support for Leopard, and was a Universal Binary, it included a backup system for Palm users to create snapshots before and after each hotsync, the reminder system, Spotlight, and a whole bunch of other things.
We've since added in to the upgrade from version 3 to the latest, all the goodies in version 5, including iPhone sync support.
Most other software companies would stop offering any discounts for people still using version 3, and would likely be charging you the full price for lagging so far behind.
There are always some improvements to be made. If you are still running at version 3, back on Tiger or Panther, (and you haven't upgraded to an Intel Mac) you are definitely missing out on some major functionality both from Apple and from us.
Be sure to put in your old 3.x license when you purchase version 5.0.5, to get the discount pricing.
Wishing you all the best - and thanks again!
--Catherine--*
Hi Catherine
Apart from the payment issue, what ARE the development plans for the future, in respect to all the mentioned ideas in this thread, and especially asking the thread title as a question "Moving LifeBalance forward?"
Since I am a new user, and getting into using the software isn't an easy thing, I obviously think about whether it's worth the effort.
As for me, the usability issues are more important than the looks. But do not underestimate good looks (and in reverse: good looks often come from usability): Any good software must keep up to date or else someday it will be outrun - since one can not patent the basic idea of it.
So I hope you can keep us users in anticipation of interesting new developments ?
Modernizing the interface
I have no complaints personally, but I recently recommended Life Balance to a couple of friends and their reaction was, "I'd use it if it wasn't so ugly." I've used both Things and OmniFocus, both of which feel very polished and look like modern Mac applications - but for me, Life Balance has so much more under the hood. That's what matters. Giving it a bit more polish, though, might help others to stick around and find out what's so great about Life Balance. FWIW.
GTD vs. GTD app
Though I can't find another term to use for these "GTD apps", they're not necessarily doing GTD or making the user do GTD. You might be enjoying them for the features they need to provide in order to make GTD easier, but it seems to me you are somewhat confused in terms of the concepts (LifeBalance and GTD's "philosophies" don't intercept in any way, since LB takes care of the 30,000ft+ that GTD only mentions) and could maybe use a formal (re?)reading of the book if you're into that sort of thing.
And in fact, I have quite successfully and simply implemented GTD using LifeBalance plus a couple support apps on the Palm. Works like a charm ;)
I also wholeheartedly agree
I also wholeheartedly agree with the original post. I also need to point out that I blogged about the Life Balance upgrade question a while back (it's the first Google hit for "life balance upgrade" today), added up my to-date costs and prospective upgrade costs, and was shocked.
If you've followed along the software for a while, this is getting progressively more expensive.
I have subsequently bought the iPhone version for my iPod touch. I like the Life Balance way, the model has always resonated with me since my first read of the advice book years ago.
However, I'm pretty seriously consider NOT upgrading the desktop app to 5.1, even though I want to (for backups and big-screen editing, primarily).
Besides the list of items above, I'd like to have:
* modern UI (I have to stress that even though it's already been said), as the Mac version is a visual turn-off (and I think the iPhone version has some cartoony elements to it)
* "in the cloud" backups and sync
* a Web front end (Life Balance would totally blow away services like Remember the Milk in many respects), which could be run a number of different ways (please compare it with RTM) and even replace the desktop app completely while being cross platform
* Places integration with locations on the iPhone/iPod touch (show me what to do where the device says I am)
* some form of integration with Microsoft Entourage (and the forthcoming rewrite, Outlook for Mac) to collect tasks from e-mail, work with its calendar, and perhaps integrate with its Projects feature
HTH, as I also would really like to see Life Balance advance. I'm not sold on using the iPhone version only, as I find managing my tasks on the small screen clunky and cumbersome so far. That's the reason I got the Mac desktop version when it became available in the first place, so I could use the bigger screen for data entry and management, and the smaller one for mobile editing and viewing my to-do list.
--
Jeremy
Again, absolutely agree about the UI
A quick question, in that Catherine seemed to completely ignore the long, considered UI question in the original post. I was expecting a reply along the lines of " we absolutely agree, it does look a bit ancient, and we are working on it" but there was no response at all. Is there an official line on this, or is nothing ever going to be done about it?
So sorry... was sure that I had replied...
Right. thanks. So sorry. I was sure I had replied.
We've been working very hard on getting the iPhone version out there, launched as a new platform and ironing out the inevitable issues that stem from that whole project.
Yes, we are working on the desktop editions too.
Thanks again, and sorry for any confusion.
Best -
--Catherine--*
My sentiments exactly...
"The last paid version of LB I have is 3.x, but I've looked at 4.x and 5.x and never saw enough improvements in the areas I have problems with to convince myself to upgrade."
My sentiments exactly. It will cost me $90 to upgrade my Mac and Palm versions to work with Snow Leopard, even with plugging in my 3.x license. Frankly, it's just too much. I understand that there were development costs for Llamagrahics to get it ready for Snow Leopard and I wouldn't expect them to do it for free. But $90 is more than I'm willing to pay, so I'll have to look for another GTD app. I'm sorry, that's just my opinion.
I don't care about the pie charts, I never use them. What I care about is my to-do list, and entering data and getting it to display the way I want is cumbersome. The part that I like best about LB is the ability to set up a list of actions and not have the successive ones appear until you complete the previous one. That is unique and it is a great feature.
Glad to be able to clear this up...
Thanks for getting in touch. No wonder you were upset! Glad to be able to clear this up. Your pricing information is simply mistaken. Your comment could easily mislead other people.
Licenses for 3.x will continue to be valid for 3.5 for Palm and 5 for Windows. Version 5 for Macintosh is a paid upgrade from version 3, but a free upgrade from version 4.
As I mentioned earlier, most (if not quite all) of our updates have been free.
It may not make a difference to you, but in the interest of being helpful to you and others who may read this, I will point out that you may not be using Life Balance to the fullest if you are unaware that the pie charts are an active component that interact with the to do list. How you intend to divide your time, energy and attention among major life ambitions and projects is a key piece of the puzzle.
I don't want you to miss out on that.
Best wishes,
--Catherine--*