Douglas Purdy

As you may know, my vision is all about giving people the power to create, access and share their data as they will.

Although I work at Microsoft, I love to see other companies making progress on technologies that I believe soundly support this vision.

Recently, I have been using a product by FileMaker (owned by Apple) called Bento.

There is both a Mac and iPhone version.  You can sync your “database” (called a library in Bent0) between your Mac and iPhone.  You can also share your libraries with any Mac on your local subnet – like iTunes – via Bonjour.

I could nitpick features I want and lament what I consider a powerful platform play Apple could execute on, but in general I have nothing but praise, great praise, for this product.

If you own an iPhone or a Mac, I really encourage you to check it out. 

Great work Bento team!

I purchased the iPhone version of OmniFocus today.  It is the most expensive application that I have purchased for the iPhone ($19.99 if I recall correctly).

Thus far, it appears worth the cost, but time will tell.  I continually challenge the processes that I use to run my life, always finding them wanting in some regard eventually.  If I am still using this in 90 days, I will deem it a “fair trade“.

The application follows a variant of GTD which I have never tried before, although I have listened the audiobook.  The GTD system seems effective in theory, I just never had an opportunity (or the desire frankly) to put it unto action.  I no longer have any excuse.

One of the nice things about the OmniFocus is a fully functional Mac OS X version that it can sync with iPhone version over Bonjour.  Both versions of the application support WebDAV, so I am considering setting up my Apache server to serve as the sync point between them.

Speaking of WebDAV, this is the first app that I have seen have first class support for this protocol in some time.  I had assumed developers would be moving to APP or something else.