almost perfect.

Life Balance 3.2.5 for OSX review.

Well, my 30 day trial is up. It's such a great, smart program. People on the job asked me to review it as a potential productivity tool for the company. Well, here it is...

Why I want to use Life Balance:
Palm Desktop was perfect. Unfortunately it hasn't changed since I started using it five years ago (aside from a new splash logo & ported to OSX). iCal has diligently been adding lots of integrated functionality I didn't know I needed, & now I rely on it all. Basically iCal has surpassed Palm Desktop in every way except the one function that is most important to me, the To-Do List. A few other things in iCal fall short but mainly the To-Do List. The iCal shared calendars have now crept into our business workflow so I've had to use both Palm Desktop & iCal. I'm tired of using both apps. With OS 10.4, the integration with Spotlight & .mac is incredible. So Life Balance is perfect. In theory Life Balance will compliment iCal in a way that I get the best of all worlds.

What is good about it:
So I shouldn't spend any time really on why this program is so great. Just read the description. It does all that. An outline, brilliant. Importance slider, brilliant. The list dictated by locations & times, brilliant. Syncs & integrates with everything, great.

There are some big problems though. Things I hope can be easily fixed for the next version. Here's my list of what keeps me from buying this app, I'll try to do it in order of importance.

The bad:
1. Interface design. On my 15 inch laptop screen (Most people have screens larger than 15 inches), Life Balance takes up 2/3 of the screen, I can stretch it to full screen but it doesn't really show me more information. The window is divided into three sub-windows. THERE ARE 11 TABS! It takes too long to do anything in Life Balance because you have to dip in & out of multiple tabs. Many of the tabs seem empty with only one or two fields in them. Please consolidate the fields in the tabs. Try to allow each tab to hold the maximum amount of controls, eliminating tabs. Increase the main window by 33%, that would add a second full list view or two task/month views, eliminating tabs. The more information displayed on the screen at one time, the faster you can use the program & schedule your life.

2. No ability to select & apply info to multiple tasks. When I have a group of mp3s in iTunes that need a field changed, I select all of them or some of them. Then I change the genre to "Electronic" & then I have 100 mp3s with the genre "Electronic". In Life Balance you can only select one task at a time. If I have ten tasks that share a deadline that's pushed back; I need to change the due date on ten different tasks one at a time, that's no good. When I did my first import of To-Dos into Life Balance, there were 100 birthdays & I wanted them all in a "Birthday" folder. I had to create the folder & instead of selecting 100 tasks; I had to drag & drop 100 tasks, 100 times into the folder. What a waste of my time. (Yes, I realize there are fancy workarounds as you become more fluent you can map Palm categories into subfolders & group tasks under an umbrella folder with a deadline but no, just let me apply info to multiple tasks please. It's fast.)

3. I found that the fastest most intuitive way to schedule a task is: Task > Time > By Calendar. You just drag the task into the visual calendar & it's set. So easy. Why can't we set everything that way? Use this fast approach to set dates that don't need to sync with the calendar. How about we set the lead time this way too. That would be so fast. I guess my problem is with the difficult "Date" entry fields. I was coming up on the end of a month & needed to schedule something one week away. So I clicked the "day" field and hit the up key seven times. But it didn't change the month field so it came back around to the beginning of the month I was in... in the past. This was relatively easy to do the math & fix but once you start scheduling things months & years away, the math gets more difficult & takes too long. Takes too long plus I have this fancy computer here to do math for me.

Conclusion:
I fully accept that Life Balance takes awhile to set up for the first time. That makes sense to me: take the time to set it up in the beginning, it starts learning & will from there on generate sensible lists. It really does becomes this personal assistant that helps you out to achieve your goals. In the current version of Life Balance it takes too long to do just about everything. Simple changes in the graphical user interface could solve just about every problem that keeps me from purchasing this app. I am not recommending Life Balance 3.2.5 to my supervisor as a productivity tool for our department until the layout is more intelligent & fosters quick information entry.