In the latter part of last year Timber was really excited about a new product from the OmniGroup called OmniFocus. It is basically a task/project management application that only runs on Macs. She said that they were currently in data testing and that I should check it out. So I signed up as a beta tester, downloaded it, watched the tutorial video and got started. Overall it take a little bit of time to get used to it and figure how to use it in the two important ways that you can use it. But once you figure it out it is a pretty powerful application. The reason I think it is a clinic and Agile Development is because they had code drops every day for the beta testers. And the cool thing about it was that I didn't have to go to their site to get it, anytime I launched OmniFocus they had a build for me to grab by having a pop up appear to tell me that a newer version was available. After I said yes and downloaded and updated the build that I had, the release notes came up to show what they did to it in the past 24 hours. And this happened just about every day from early November up through early January. Even on Thanksgiving and Christmas. I wondered how much these guys were working, and what kinds of automated tests they have in place if they can release a new version every day. And I never ran into any major defects that caused OmniFocus to crash. In fact I ran into very few defects at all. So if you are developing software and want to go agile try living up to how the OmniGroup does it by:
1. Having daily builds that run automated regression tests and
2. Release the code to actual customers, you will quickly find out if you have any major issues and it will make your product much better.
The cool thing about doing beta testing was that I got to buy it for half off what they charge the public, and I helped make it a better product. So if you are in the market for a good product (for the Mac) that will allow you to easily manage large and small projects you should definitely check out OmniFocus.
Posted by troutm8 at January 22, 2008 10:19 AM