There was a subreddit I saw a couple of days ago on /gtd, where Redditors discussed which GTD app is the most good looking. It reminded me of a problem I wanted to write about for a while now: their list design’s readability. I know OmniFocus, Things, and Reminders well, so I concluded my experience about their typography below:

1. Omnifocus Ios 14 Update

A lot of people would say it’s Things. It has a friendly UI, but from a readability point of view, it is one of the worst.

In my daily work, I have two problems with Things:

IOS apps: iPhone, iPad, or iPod touch running iOS 8 or later. App Clips require iOS 14 or later. IMessage apps and sticker packs require iOS 10 or later. TvOS apps: Apple TV running tvOS 9 or later. WatchOS apps: Apple Watch running watchOS 2 or later. TestFlight is not available for Mac apps. Available Languages. (Automation was introduced in OmniFocus for iOS v2.14. Inside OmniFocus has a bit of a primer on it, too.) The new version includes several updates for new features that have been added to OmniFocus since version 1.0 shipped. There's also an additional 40 minutes of content on OmniFocus Automation. OmniFocus is a personal task manager by the Omni Group for macOS and iOS.The declared goal of the program is to be able to capture thoughts and ideas into to do lists. The program uses concepts and techniques described in the book Getting Things Done by David Allen. OmniFocus Once you have your system properly set up in that app there's no going back. IOS 14.4 is out now! Read about everything new in this release.

• It only displays one line per task, which means, if you have longer task titles, you’ll end with a bunch of text clipped out, which is annoying on an iPhone. You have to open each task to see the full title, which is no fun when you quickly want to review your errands list.
• Things displays every task list grouped by project. If you like me, you’ll usually have one next action per project, so having each project being this prominent is making your lists very noisy.

I stopped using Things because of these issues, and I switched back to OmniFocus, which displays full task titles, and has nicer list readability overall. Apple Reminder is also good at showing lists, which matters the most at the end, so I would go with OmniFocus and Reminders.

Let’s see these apps next to each other. From left to right are OmniFocus, Reminders, and Things.

As you can see, Things overflows the text and group actions by projects which makes the readability of a typical next actions list much worse. It was the main reason I left Things after using it for two years and switched back to OmniFocus.

Omnifocus Ios 14 Update

I also made a switch from OmniFocus to Reminders in December, but that’s a topic of another post.