Ghost Action and GTD on the iPhone
I have got several requests from users that want to see Ghost Action on the iPhone. I too would like that very much. But it will not happen as long as Apple doesn’t want it to. There is no way I can make that a viable business. That’s a pity since Ghost Action would work very well as a native iPhone application.
I think that locking out 3rd party developers from the iPhone is a really bad move by Apple. Especially when they are lying about the reasons for it. Hopefully there will be a backlash and they will have to rethink their decision.
What’s more likely than Apple opening up the iPhone, is that they will provide their own iPhone to-do list. That seems logical given that even Apple Mail in Leopard will handle to dos and that there is sophisticated support in OS X for syncing data including to-dos to handheld devices. This would be a workable solution since Ghost Action then could sync to the iPhone, but it would not be great, since Apple’s application most likely wouldn’t let you organize your todos both according to context and project as Ghost Action does.
October 30th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
when will compatibility with Leopard, Mac OS X 10.5 occur ?
March 22nd, 2008 at 7:22 pm
Is this project dead? I brought a licence and haven’t had any updates in ages…
March 30th, 2008 at 9:49 am
No the project is not dead. I fresh update is in the works and will soon be released. Until then, there is an alpha version with Leopard support available on the download page.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:48 am
Well… looking at the date of these messages… at the latest release date, at the fact that I’ve never had any update (the leopard version is -as you stated an “ALPHA” i.e.: a hack to make it work), etcetera, I have enough facts to say that I’m never buying a Ghost Park Action licence of software ever.
I am sorry but I buy a lot of shareware / donationware and this is more like Duke Nuken Forever…
No even a SINGLE comment in the blog in more than a year? That’s not a way to treat paying customers. I brought a licence for a beta product that never got out of alpha. I even sent dozens of suggestions and the reply was: “will be done, will be done, will be done…”.
That never happened. In almost two years.
April 23rd, 2009 at 9:53 am
For god’s sake… the OS X version still has brush metal appearance… c’mon.
If I could have a refund, I’d surely do it. In either case, I switched to Things a *LONG* time ago. But when I mean a long i really mean it.
If the author of Ghost Action thinks that I’m buying the iPhone version again, he’s clearly wrong… very wrong. You need to sell trust and confidence in your customers or future ones, not blatant lies. Sorry, this is a fiasco.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:13 am
Martin, I’m sorry you feel that way. But let me clarify a few things:
Yes, the final version 1.3 for Leopard was slow to being released, but it has in fact been released recently. In fact, the “alfa” version was working excellently a few weeks after Leopard was released and it has ever since. It’s my mistake to call it a “alfa” when in fact it was much better than that.
Ghost Action has never had “brushed metal” appearance while running on Leopard.
It’s true that the development of Ghost Action has been slow lately, mainly because of slow sales. I guess that goes for every commercial endeavour; if your sales are slow you cannot continue development forever. Also, Ghost Action is built around Apple’s to-do and Sync Engine infrastructure which seems to have been abandoned by Apple since the Iphone doesn’t support it, thus complicating further development of Ghost Action.
April 23rd, 2009 at 10:59 am
Jacob,
Please let me also clarify that I don’t have anything against you or Ghost Park Software; I understand the slow sales/slow development problem and I am sorry about it, but if you don’t update and or provide feature requests, then sales will go down. It’s a difficult thing to balance. In my humble opinion, you didn’t balance that the right way. Ghost Action has been a nice idea in a world where there weren’t many GTD’s for Mac (or at least there was room for another). A nice idea. However, it’s been silent for over two years and it wasn’t free.
On the other hand, if you compare at what Culture Code did, they released a free version first, for almost a year. People loved the product and a lot (don’t have numbers) brought it when it was “finally” released.
I understand that you need to earn money to live in the 1st place but not having a single update in more than a year is “too much” for a non free, unfinished product.
The brushed metal appearance is -of course- not on Leopard because the OS takes care of it, however it still has under Tiger (as far as I know).
I appreciate the refund you just sent me (I guess I shouldn’t have asked for that, I was angry I guess, I apologize).
In any case, I’d suggest you take 15 minutes a week to write/blog about what you’re doing (regarding your products). If you stay silent for too long, people get upset; if you’re not updating GA for Mac anymore, just write about it, or at least release it for free until you have the time to fix it or improve it. When I brought it, it was because it allowed me to add things to iCal easily. As I’ve mentioned before now I have switched to other alternatives, mainly because I NEEDED the software to do certain things (no pun intended) that GA didn’t do properly.
I wish you the best of luck with this iPhone Application, I’m sure things will be better now (iPhone is an amazing platform in every aspect). But remember, stay in touch.
Sincerely, Martín.