AskSam

This seems to have a single window interface, and relies on its search capability to find entries. It has a type of card file metaphor, but far less useful than Zoot, for example.

InfoSelect

This had to be my favourite package in the late 80s early 90s. It ran as a 'TSR', terminate and stay resident application, so it could be 'popped up' over a foreground program for intermittent use. I've mentioned it before, but here are some screen shots. Note the quirky menu item names.

ZoomRacks

My first piece of non-linear PIM software. ZoomRacks. It came from Atari, I think, and was designed with a card file metaphor in a text-based system. So nothing looked like a card. It has some hypertext functionality. So here we are, from the mid 1980s.

My Assistant

I was IT manager for a large consulting firm in the late 1980s and after implementing a production IT system, was looking around for a local user organising tool. This was before the days of MS Outlook, or other more sophisticated PIMs that brought notes, diary and do-lists together.

My Assistant was reviewed in a newspaper article; the developer was in North Sydney, near my office, so I dropped in to visit. He demonstrated the software, which he had developed for a politician friend of his.

It looked great, but the board of my company was less impressed, being keen pen and paper users.

Here's a screen from it.

Lotus Agenda

Just for the memories (or for 'reference' to make it seem more serious), screen shots from Lotus Agenda running President's  Planner.

Agenda fired up quite happily in a DOS box on my old XP machine. It runs smoothly, and apart from cut and paste between applications not being available, is quite useable. I love it for the sheer genius of the software design in the small footprint that DOS had.

Lotus Agenda

Every so often I Google Lotus Agenda.

I come up with Bob Newel's helpful page, which grows a little each time I drop by.

But recently, I came across Connected Text. Not a bad wiki system; and a blog just on note taking.

While on note taking, a few favourites:

NoteTab

CintaNotes

Quicknote

Notepad Plus

Wikipad

Anti-functions in Outlook

At work my team and I are finalising a long and complex document. We are all working on it: reading, commenting, suggesting amendments, you know the deal. Ideally we'd all be working on the one copy of the file, but having different server access, this cannot work. We could use TRIM our quite useful document management system, but that only allows serial sharing: it can't handle concurrent editing of the one document.

So, the author uses Outlook, our corporate groupware product, and e-mails the document to all of us; we comment in Microsoft Word's tracked changes mode and the author compiles the changes.

I started work on the document soon after I received the e-mail, but couldn't complete. To block out the time I needed, I copied the e-mail to the Outlook calendar.

Next day, I opened the calendar entry for the document, opened the now embedded email, then opened the attached document, and got back to work.

After some time I discovered that my work of the day before was not included in the file. Of course, it was a copy, a different file, now! Oh great, an anti-feature of Outlook strikes again.

My constant irritation with Outlook is that, despite its very useful functions, it has a major anti-function. It copies, instead of allowing another instance of a single document.

I guess I've been spoilt by InfoQube and Zoot which replicates items, it doesn't copy them, unless of course you want to copy them. So one can work on any instance of an item, and every other instance of it will show the work done.

In Outlook e-mail has the same problem. I can only put an e-mail in one folder, even if it relates to a number of folders I have. What I'd really find productive would be if I could put the one e-mail in multiple folders, and see it searchably with multiple categories (in Outlook 2003, the one we use at work, you can't search on categories: anti-feature #2), reflect it in Tasks and Notes as well as the Calendar. Then we'd be talkin' computing, and not electronic card filing!

Info Select

In a clean out I came across an old 3.5 in. floppy disk box. It still had some disks in it, including backups of my InfoSelect install disk. There were also upgrade disks for Datacad 6 (released by Cadkey in the mid 1990s), an application called 'Squiggle' which made CAD drawings look hand-drawn, and a patch for the single user version of Alpha 4 database.

I decided to see what the disks revealled.

The Alpha 4 disk was readable, so I copied its contents to the HD; neither Squiggle, nor Datacad could be read, but I think I've already got them onto CD; but the InfoSelect! I'd forgotten about this. So I loaded it up: first disk: much grinding of drive, then a 'not formatted' message. Trash that one. Second disk: I got a directory list out of it; but couldn't copy the files due to a failed 'read'. However, they did copy one at a time, so, up and running in a DOS box!

Info Select does one thing really well. It quickly enters and stores text notes, and has a fabulous search function. I used to use it as a memory resident application in DOS, and it was great at what it did.

More recent versions, from the first Windows version, went Baroque, however: too much unnecessary elaboration around the great core functionality, and it got bogged down in 'featureitis.

Task Managers

One of the software 'tools' that seems to have proliferated in the shareware world is task 'managers'. I'll not bore you with a long list of links. but a few that I've come across lately are:

• TreeDBNotes
• Swift To Do List
• otak

Some of the features of otak seemed useful, but not useful enough, so I emailed the author (as his website invites), only to discover that the product has been inactive for some time, with the author off on other things.

The failing of  task managers, to my mind; and I refer mainly to my experience of Microsoft Outlook, is the very restricted view of what a 'task' is.
If the task is something like 'get some milk', or, 'post letters today', then they are probably fine; but for business use, its useless. Imagine a task 'take over Extrata'. Useless.
A task manager would become useful to me if it had features such as:

• Place tasks in groups (otak does this), and see what other tasks are in the group, with their assignees
• Sequence tasks; not as a fully fledged project scheduler, but simply to be able to relate a group of tasks, and ensure that when one goes late, the others' start or finish dates are adjusted
• Set task durations or lead times (or both): Outlook seems to think that a due date is sufficient, but when a 5 week task pops up on the due date, one would be at a loss to do it (maybe this means I need shorter tasks, but grouped, or linked)
• Link tasks to people (so one can see who has what tasks.
• Identify when a task's advancement awaits work by someone else (a 'contact')
• Attach documents to tasks by file location
• Have a calendar view of tasks
• Show dependencies: other tasks or people's work that is dependent on this task, and other activity upon which the task itself depends, with capability to track the 'input' tasks.

Review of Efficient PIM

My quest for an effective, long lasting and flexible PIM is probably going to be everlasting and a quest where I have to keep adjusting my objectives to what the market is able to offer. After all, if no one is going to use a product, except me, then no one is going to develop it.

An offering I’ve recently started to use is Efficient PIM. I’ve tested the portable version (ah, remember when all software was ‘portable’) and from opening the zip file, all went well. The package opens fast and cleanly, with an interface that is well structured, attractively designed and easily adjusted for colour scheme. It seems to be largely modelled on the screen look of Microsoft Outlook, which I’ve been using intensively for a few years at work (employer’s choice, not mine). Outlook offers a number of nice features which I find helpful, but it is, like most PIM-type packages, limited in a number of glaring ways.

I frequently drag between types of ‘folder’ in Outlook. For example, an e-mail that will require follow up by a certain day gets copied to that day in the calendar, with a reminder for action. I’d like to also copy it to tasks, to keep track of it in that interface too, but Outlook makes each copy a new instance, rather than a reflection of the single entry, so one ends up having to manage a number of items about the same thing, which gets confusing and so I don’t do this.

Efficient PIM doesn’t seem to have the capability to drag items between package elements in Outlook fashion; that is, to have an entry appear in a number of places, even as a copy, let alone an instance of the original entry.

The modules cover all the most used PIM areas: calendar, contacts, tasks, notes and some less often seen areas: passwords, with quite a good password generator, websites, which is rather basic. For instance, I’d like to be able to drag an address from the browser address bar into the website list screen and have it arrive with metadata such as time and date saved. As it is one has to cut and paste. Not a great problem, but why do I have to do the work that a computer should?

Each module appears to be thorough, robust and easy to use, which is great. But each largely stands alone, although contacts can be linked in to events, providing a handy cross linking of information.

I would like to see better cross linking between modules, so that the modules become views of the data, rather than the source of the data. So I could look enter an event, see it in tasks, if I checked that it was also a task, could link it to contacts, and see it against those contacts, as well as in the calendar.

I like to extend my PIM to projects, as well, and I’ve found that a good work around is to use the Contacts module for this. A project is entered as though it were a contact, and then I can join contacts to it, and pick it up as a ‘contact’ in events, etc. Very useful for tracking small projects.

A further refinement would be to improve the notes area to include hierarchical note organisation and enable tagging or categorisation of notes, or preferably both. But categorisation is useful not only for notes, but should extend to everything, as it does in Outlook. Although one cannot do much with Outlook categories. Hierarchical categories would be very helpful.

Notes should also be linked to every other module. So I could keep notes on contacts, events, tasks, projects (projects as a special type of contact would be good, as would be organisations to which contacts could be assigned), and view them either with the contact, event, task, etc, or in list of notes, and showing the links to other entries.

Efficient PIM is a useful and reasonably thorough package, although it has limitations, but limitations that most other packages have too.

On the plus side, it works well, is wide ranging across most PIM needs, and is implemented very smoothly and professionally.

My views of its limitations come from having been spoilt by a number of older packages that have great flexibility, linking between items and multiple view capability. A combination of the ancient Lotus Agenda (here's an article on Agenda), probably the pinnacle of PIMs, Ecco Pro, for its time, and in some ways still, a peak example of what a PIM could be, and Zoot, from Zoot Software, which has the flexible information storage capability that is essential in managing large amounts of information.