This sounds a very interesting discussion to me. In my understanding of the situation, GTD is a useful way to work that Omnifocus interprets quite well, but maybe Agenda can open new territories especially in term of creating a powerful tool on the side of developing articulated projects. As Drew says, Agenda isn’t a calendar app but working well with them, so maybe it could be good to develop more agenda in connection with an idea of timeline that maybe can be reinforced.
Surely a big step will be the IOS version of Agenda, allowing to work more easily on the move. And connecting it with Apple Notes maybe would be very useful, especially when you are on the move.
OmniFocus has been my go to app for years in no small part because it’s always with me and quick to update. I didn’t realize that Agenda has direct “Share” features with three main apps I use frequently (DevonThink, OmniFocus, and Spark) and I haven’t explored this yet. I don’t have adequate control of Agenda yet to manage it for GTD but as has been said that needs iOS to be fully implemented any way.
Thanks for the new App and this interactive community. Dale
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DT. - I use the same apps you do (Spark and Omnifocus) The handoff to them is rough from Agenda though.
In Omnifocus - if you share, choose Omnifocus and choose selected note, the whole note content is passed to OF as the title, which is really annoying as there’s no way to control that. I’ve tried that share with other Task managers and the result is different on each one. The interface to Spark, though,i is terrific! The note is copied to the body and a new email is brought up for addressing. Very efficient and works great.
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The handoff to them is rough from Agenda though.
See this topic:
Point taken, but disappointing. If you are Omnifocus and these other apps that have been around successfully for years, what’s their motivation to change the way THEIR things work for a new app like Agenda? Being in the software development management field for 30 years that’s not the way they think. If you are going to integrate to those solutions that complement Agenda’s functionality (as Drew has said many times) I’m confused as to how that happens without some collaborative effort. Perhaps this is just a long-term item that gets addressed at some later time.
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I use Spark too, because I think it is very efficient, anyway the note copied is not so good like Agenda can do with Airmail. https://agenda.community/t/linking-airmail-3-and-things-3/3550/13?u=maurizio.bortolotti
Agree it is not ideal, but the way the system works, all we can do is offer a variety of data formats to other apps. What they do with it is beyond our control. It may not even be clear what they should do with it. For example, if you send a PDF to OmniFocus, how should it present that?
You also have to remember that while we want our app to work well with other apps, and do our best to support it, many of these apps are direct or indirect competitors, so collaboration may not be on the cards.
Sure. Understand. I think of Airmail, for instance that went above and beyond to get good integration to industry leaders and those got built into their software. Postbox did something similar. Asana, a web-based collaboration tool, built tools so that their system, could sync with Omnifocus (they really didn’ t have to).
It may be possible to target particular apps down the track. It requires using their special features. For now we have built the standard macOS sharing into the app, and have to focus on iOS and other major features. I’m sure we’ll get to it sooner or later.
I’m sure you will, too. Your competitive space will demand it. Bear, Apple Notes, Dropbox Paper, Zoho, Quip and other are like this app. They’ve been around longer and offer certain features that are not in Agenda quite yet. As you get into the iOS world, you get into a VERY competitive world with apps like Notablity, Notes Plus, NoteBook and more. That space is even HARDER that the desktop. That’s where strategic integrations can be a big advantage in a user’s product differentiation.
Is it possible to do this though with an app that is “more simple” such as Apple’s Reminders?
After reviewing other similar programs, it doesn’t seem that Agenda is any better or any worse that other solutions in it’s integration to other things, so it’s a bit of a moot point.
Like others, though, I struggle to really get a solid feel for what the developers want Agenda to really be. Right now, it’s Apple notes, basically. It’s Bear. It’s a note taker, frankly, with a few neat things. I think that we all are pushing a lot of ideas what we WANT it to be….a to-do list, a report publisher, a project journal. Outside of the developers wanting to get the iOS offering to market, I haven’t really gotten a solid feel for what they REALLY have as a conceptual roadmap. Maybe they are just soliciting feedback in hopes of us helping them define that. For me it’s doing exactly what I want right now, but they DO need to bring it up to the level of it’s current competition in features ( many of which we’ve already described in these forum entries.)
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Our objective for Agenda is what you already see now: a note taker with a focus on projects and dates. We will add features as we go, but the core is already there. You can already see what it is and decide if it is for you.
It will never be a task manager like Things or OmniFocus. It has some overlap (lists etc), but it will never match those apps feature-for-feature. You either have to find a way to integrate Agenda with those apps, or adapt whatever system you have been using so that it fits better with the freeform note taking approach that Agenda has.
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This is really good to hear! It’s exactly what I think most of us DO want. Others might be disappointed it’s not ALL those things, though. LOL.
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Well put.
A more robust iOS / x-callback scheme on the Agenda side would perhaps be the easiest way to bring much of this value to the product.
I hope it moves up in priority.
I use Agenda for GTD by just adding tags, such as likely time, energy or cost, location, monthly (for the next review), or whatever, then add things to 2do as necessary. So far I’m just copy/pasting them, but the amount of great use I get out of Agenda makes that small amount on inconvenience well worthwhile 
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The biggest reason I still use Things 3 for GTD is that I have always used Things, so it has years of items to remember (like restaurants to try tagged by city). Lots of these things aren’t really ideal for Things because they kinda go away once I check them off, so an app like Agenda might be better suited for things I would like to remember but not forget. Any idea how Agenda might scale if I dumped my years of Things things into it? Is there a known upper limit for the number of notes before Agenda starts to bog down?
There’s no theoretical limit, what we do notice is that it’s important to find a balance between note length and separate notes. If you create a book-long single note it can make editing of such a note slow at the moment, and can even give some issues on iOS displaying the note due to hardware limits (we’re talking 30k lines or more). Similarly, if you put each todo item in an individual note and as such creates a project with a thousand notes, that too could get you in trouble. Dozens of projects with dozens of notes of medium size should scale just fine however.
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This discussion has changed how I plan on using this app. I saw Agenda featured in the App Store and love the design, so I gave it a go. Being new to officially trying GTD (I’ve tinkered with some aspects of it over the years), I wanted to use this app as my everything; after all, I like simplicity and using as little apps as possible. But, maybe I need a dedicated GTD app (I’m going to try Things 3) and a great note taking app (obviously Agenda).
I can’t overstate how much I appreciate the design of this app. I do think it is possible that the app can be my project manager, task list, and notebook, but I’ll patiently wait until that day.
I still have all of OmniGroup’s apps but I rarely use them nowadays. The problem was and is that they don’t work together. So you’d have OmniFocus and -Plan and they’re completely separate entities, although they’re both about planning and GTD. Then there’s OmniOutliner (my mostly used Omni app) which lets you check off things - and which was the original “OmniFocus” app - but doesn’t really communicate with OmniFocus. OmniGraffle is a totally different story. Great app!
So I now do everything - and I mean everything that’s somehow got to do with planning, GTD, storing info etc etc … in Agenda.
Oh yes. When there’s things I really have to be reminded of, I make a Reminder (which shows up in Agenda).
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