Valhalla Island

Schoolhouse has spoilt me, where there was once a mess there is now organisation. Beside a few little bugs, it’s scope, level of functionality and beautiful interface is perfect. It makes me a better student. Recently work at Brisbane Creative has picked up and I felt information consistently escaping my mind, I needed a Schoolhouse for my little business, a central hub of organisation, I went on the hunt for some good project management software.

The problem with business software is it’s made for business people. While I run a business, I’m not really a business person. It’s a strange breed of software. A good example is Powerpoint versus Keynote. The entire MS Office suite is a good example, a group of interfaces jam packed with bullshit you’ll probably never use, it’s like every possibility has an icon and they’ve all been loaded into a default toolbar.

The business and finance section on the OS X download website is proof of the overwhelming complexity of most business apps. You just need to see the screenshots. Merlin goes so far as to list out every single possible task and break it down into half hour increments. It’s impossible to guess with such precision how long individual tasks will take, it’s a waste of time trying. All I wanted was something that could look after a list of projects, add dates, add notes and attach files, possibly also manage clients.

I’d almost given up looking when I came across DayLite, a $189 monster, that from the screenshots,looked like all that money had been sunk into a simplified and refined interface. After an extrememly long installation process things weren’t looking good, it’d hijacked Mail! It attached it’s own shelf to every Mail window and I still have no idea how to get rid of them.

Daylite was good but obviously not designed for a business of my size, things seemed out of proportion. My precious list of current projects was buried in a pile of rubbish I didn’t care for. To Daylite’s credit, I was able to modify the interface somewhat, but not nearly enough for it to be bearable or to be worth the price tag.

Joey then raised my hopes, Jumsoft’s Operation looks OK from the outside. It was almost exactly what I wanted, a nice clear project list, with the ability to add dates and tasks but the interface burnt my eyes, it’s the definition of unpolished.

Click through to Flickr for a shot of the wood in it’s retina burning glory. What are they doing? The sidebar is perfect,  it’s exactly what I was looking for. What happened? If you’re going to go for full blown metaphor, you have to nail it, it has to be perfect, you can’t have a flat paperclip, you can’t have paper with a border and no depth, you can’t have sharp red dashed lines or random looking indenting. A plain jane, native interface will always beat a poorly implemented metaphor.

I know the wood thing is all the rage these days but you need to get it right, Kristin’s blog is a great example of wood done well. So is Delicious Library:

Operation had the right idea but lacked the interface, Daylite had the interface but was obviously made for needs much more complex than my own, it also took over my computer, installing it’s own apps, menu bar items, hijacking Mail, etc.

I wish I could say I found a glorious, all conquering, project management solution, but I didn’t. In the end I took an app I already had, YoJimbo, a flexible note-taking app and easily adapted it to simple project management. It’s not perfect but for me, it’s the best Project Manager I could find.