1

Too much friction

Simon Smailus

June 06, 2017 09:39

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I have been testing out pagico 8 for nearly a week.

On the whole I like it, but the friction to using it is beginning to show. As it's not a native app and keyboard shortcuts are a real problem, making it unintuitive. Dragging and dropping files is hit or miss. It doesn't alway work and nor does the preview.

One of my bigger issues is that I cannot arrange the projects view to how I want it permanently. There are no settings to change this. Creating tasks is wat to slow, especially lists.

That said I love the dashboard and calendar.

I have close to 100 projects and 300 tasks. I need things to be snappy. Capture must be quick and flawless. As much as I like Pagico it will not replace Omnifocus. Omnifocus' perspectives is it's killer feature and makes it much easier to see your projects and tasks in different view.

I must say though that since v6 Pagico has come a long way! well done.

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7 comments

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  CM June 07, 2017 03:30 Official comment

  Simon,

  First off, many thanks for your detailed notes! As you know, we're always listening and working to further improve Pagico.

  We'll prioritize the better support of keyboard actions and optimize the performance of key actions such as task & list creation, etc. The Perspective view from OF is indeed very powerful, and we could certainly improve our Smart Collections feature to match that in the near future. For now, one remaining question for you though:

   - Arranging project views.

  Were you referring to the order of data objects inside a project? 

   

  Thank you again for your input!

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  Simon Smailus June 07, 2017 09:02

  When I click on Projects in the sidebar it lists my projects. Above is the tags browser below the list of projects. I use the flags to highlight urgent projects. The project list can be sorted by flags, title or modified. However, that sorting does not remain. When I move to another view and return the sorting always reverts back to modified. This create many extra clicks to have to click on flags each time you leave that view. I could of course use tags to sort by urgent, but often I want to see all the projects in a tag with urgent ones having a different colour. This gives me a better overview than just using an urgent tag.

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  Simon Smailus June 07, 2017 09:21

  I should probably add that over the years I've used a number of Java applications (I'm assuming Pagico is because of it's look feel and speed). Each time I find that non native apps are extremely frustrating because they don't behave like native apps. An obvious point here are keyboard shortcuts. But there are other annoyances such as needing to click a button to edit text or double click the text to edit (as is the case with Pagico). Because long term users of an OS create muscle memory in doing every day tasks these changes to the expected norm break a smooth workflow. I appreciate that it is easier to code once and deploy to different platforms, but it doesn't give the best a particular OS has to offer. Java apps also don't play nice with other applications and integration into the OS is also limited. This is why I will alway pick a native app over a Java app. As Pagico is a productivity app integration with other apps such as email are essential. In Omnifocus, a keyboard shortcut creates a new task with the email and I can place it in any project I want to or create a new on one the fly. This is fast. In Pagico I need to drag the email then click the email and create a task. Depending on the number of projects/tasks you create a day this can add considerable time. It was one of the deciding factors for me in staying with Omnifocus. A week with Pagico and I was spending way to much time creating projects and tasks. In the end, as much as I really like Pagico; I love the calendar, the dashboard is superb and I really like the way tags help me narrow down projects and tasks, the friction in getting tasks in and files in massively increased my time in processing. This is time I cannot afford and having been used to it being super fast became a frustration very quickly.

  I think your support has been excellent and really appreciate the speed with which you deal with queries.

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  Martin Bishop June 08, 2017 04:55

  Yes I see the need to arrange projects and the ability to do so with tasks as well.

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  Tmikaeld August 02, 2018 15:38

  It's a bit unfair to compare Omnifocus that doesn't have team-collaboration or ANY cross-platform capabilities whatsoever with one that does.

  @Simon The issues your describing, would you mind explaning or recording the differences? I'm very curious as to the actual differences. (I'm new to Pagico)

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  Simon Smailus August 02, 2018 20:58

  I appreciate the comparison is not fair in terms of cross platform or collaboration, but my perspective was on how I currently manage tasks and how it was with Pagico.

  I believe my earlier post highlights my differences. Pagico has great functionality, but as a non native app does not integrate with the Mac OS easily. That would be my main observation. For me this is not trivial as I use many applications and native apps all use the same keyboard shortcuts for the same tasks. Pagico does not. It became increasingly difficult to incorporate Pagico into my workflow for those reasons. As someone who mainly uses the keyboard Pagico's necessity to drag items into it started to massively slow down my productivity.

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  CM August 06, 2018 13:44

  @Simon,

  Very valid points. We are aware of the fact that Pagico still relies heavily on the mouse for most of the interactions. We are working hard to streamline the way features are organized and increase the efficiency of keyboard actions to reduce the friction.

  I'm sorry that Pagico ended up taking more time than its merit, but please rest assured that we're working to make it better every day.

  Thank you!