The wider implications of recommending a proprietary application (worse: a GUI based one which costs money and is only available on one platform) is that now your documents are tied to a particular time of reference in an ecosystem. Something which moves.
For context I have lost files because the old version of the software which could read the formats would not run on my operating system, and purchasing a new license for the updated version was no guarantee that it would work either as the format had changed.
Yes, this is a stupid qualm to have when Excel/Word exists, but in those cases the alternative is not easily digestible plain text documents.
The case for making things more proprietary and costly should come with serious considerations.
Especially at $10/mo. That's more than I pay for Netflix.
(FD: I'm not an org-mode or emacs user, and this was written on a Mac)
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.
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.
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.
The wider implications of recommending a proprietary application (worse: a GUI based one which costs money and is only available on one platform) is that now your documents are tied to a particular time of reference in an ecosystem. Something which moves.
I am not an OmniFocus user, recent versions of OmniFocus can export data to the TaskPaper format (which is just plain text) or to a CSV file.
For context I have lost files because the old version of the software which could read the formats would not run on my operating system, and purchasing a new license for the updated version was no guarantee that it would work either as the format had changed.
Yes, this is a stupid qualm to have when Excel/Word exists, but in those cases the alternative is not easily digestible plain text documents.
The case for making things more proprietary and costly should come with serious considerations.
Especially at $10/mo. That's more than I pay for Netflix.
(FD: I'm not an org-mode or emacs user, and this was written on a Mac)
Information on the '.ofocus' file format here: https://github.com/tomzx/ofocus-format