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I think OmniFocus can export in a wide variety of formats, including plain text formats, so you can always take backups of plain text files. I agree that a FOS

I think OmniFocus can export in a wide variety of formats, including plain text formats, so you can always take backups of plain text files. I agree that a FOSS solution is preferable to a proprietary one, however, an easy to use software with a GUI is also preferable to one with a good amount of learning curve. I don't have any issue with the GUI. I also don't have any issue with costing money. Quality software can cost money, since it costs money to create it. The alternative is software which spies on you and serves you ads. I don't know any other model by which a note taking app can make money. What's wrong with costing money anyways. A vast majority of HN earns fat salaries writing software. Either those salaries have to come from selling software or from tracking users. I much more prefer software being charged for.

dijit 6y ago
It's not about costing money, it's about costing a lot of money and being a proprietary format. The idea of locking myself out of my data is unappealing. And as I replied to the sibling: the ability to export to a format does not mean that it's the default, that it's optimal and not lossy. If you were able to change the output format permanently to .taskpaper and the software "just worked" I would have less of an issue. I don't mind software costing money (I pay for an all-license JetBrains account) but that doesn't lock information away in proprietary formats requiring me to renew my subscription or lose my data.
- enitihas 6y ago
  What information is lost in OmniFocus when backing up to a textual format?
  - dijit 6y ago
    Inside the link to the .ofocus teardown you can see references to task parallelisation, along with "rankings", "project"-scopes and so on. All of this is lost on export/import from .taskpaper, since there's no easy taskpaper representation of such data. Representing this as a "backup" implies that it can be completely recovered, but that would certainly not be the case, this is an export, a new, lossy, representation of data. That is also assuming that you consistently export to .taskpaper and not just rely on the default format - which is what everyone and there mum is going to be doing. Because consistently exporting to plaintext is not a common workflow.

dijit 6y ago

It's not about costing money, it's about costing a lot of money and being a proprietary format. The idea of locking myself out of my data is unappealing. And as I replied to the sibling: the ability to export to a format does not mean that it's the default, that it's optimal and not lossy. If you were able to change the output format permanently to .taskpaper and the software "just worked" I would have less of an issue. I don't mind software costing money (I pay for an all-license JetBrains account) but that doesn't lock information away in proprietary formats requiring me to renew my subscription or lose my data.

enitihas 6y ago
What information is lost in OmniFocus when backing up to a textual format?
- dijit 6y ago
  Inside the link to the .ofocus teardown you can see references to task parallelisation, along with "rankings", "project"-scopes and so on. All of this is lost on export/import from .taskpaper, since there's no easy taskpaper representation of such data. Representing this as a "backup" implies that it can be completely recovered, but that would certainly not be the case, this is an export, a new, lossy, representation of data. That is also assuming that you consistently export to .taskpaper and not just rely on the default format - which is what everyone and there mum is going to be doing. Because consistently exporting to plaintext is not a common workflow.