Stephen Builds a New Task App

When Steven Robles came home from a family reunion to find a pipe had burst in his ceiling, his smart home leak sensors hadn't caught it — because the leak was in a wall, dripping onto a kitchen table, not onto a sensor. "The sensors were where the leak happened," he explained, which is to say they weren't. The incident reminded him to look into an automatic main valve shutoff device, but it also set the stage for a conversation about what happens when the tools you have don't quite solve the problems you actually face.

The Task Management Landscape

David Sparks has lived through the evolution of task management on Apple devices. He started with OmniFocus in early beta and stayed loyal for years, but earlier this year he moved everything into Obsidian, creating individual text files for each task with metadata fields for status, project, and custom taxonomy. The idea was to let AI manipulate those files — the robot course he teaches required him to understand text-based task management deeply. But the system broke down on iPhone and iPad, where navigating individual text files in Obsidian felt cumbersome. "I miss OmniFocus," he admitted, and he's now planning to fold OmniFocus back in using its OmniJS automation language, creating a hybrid stack.