Wampum

One of the great shareware databases produced by Ward Mundy (who I recently exhanged e-mails with...I must ask for unlock keys for Wampum so I can play with it a little more).

Surefire

Before MS Word had classy things like fields, an obscure shareware package had them. It may have been inspired by Q&A, an 80s data management-word processor.

Some screens from Surefire:

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.

Writing on computer

I'm a sucker for writing applications. Serious writing takes something like Scrivener, which I've had for years, and of course I have and use Word for businessy  type writing. I also loaded up Ability suite of office type applications, along with the Libra set. I was after something that loaded fast and was quick to use. I'd used Ability back in the days of DOS, and liked it well enough then, so worth a look, I thought.

Amazingly the little Ability Write is as slow as a wet week to load, but OK once in. LibraOffice is quick enough, but I've slipped back to Jarte, a nice quick tool based on Microsoft WordPad for my everyday quick writing.

Notes are a different thing. I use ResophNotes, linked to my Simplenote account, mostly. The great Cintanotes for more serious stuff, which could end up in Zoot or Ultra Recall, depending on what it's for, but usually Zoot. I couldn't resist Quicknote because of its cute start point. Its just for jotting.

old computing 1

My first computer was an Amstrad 286 running DOS, of course.

It had 1Mb of RAM and a 40Mb HDD. Nothing much these days.

On it I ran Word 5, mainly, a few shareware packages and Timeline 3, I think it was.

I replaced this with an Amstrad 386 shortly afterwards and added Windows to the mix. It was necessary to run Excel, which I did.

I added a couple of other packages over time: I was fascinated with Hypercard on the Mac, and bought a Brightbill Roberts knock off named Hyper Pad. It was very buggy. I also bought Toolbook thinking it would do something similar, but it did not.

On both I relied on Norton Commander for file management, although I added XTreePro Gold for some of its nicer functionality. Commander was my mainstay.

For pure text processing I used Boxer; very handy for making batch files, which I found very neat speed ups for a lot of system level work, starting programs, etc.

Kitting up a Mac

Kitting out a Mac for a high school student:

The basic kit that comes with the Mac is fine, but to go finer, here’s what I’m adding:

Quicksilver: best for quick keyboard access to everything. If that didn’t work so well, Alfred but the productivity pack is a payer.

Finder is pretty good for everyday work, but to really lift the hood on the file system: Pathfinder.

Evernote, but with Alternote/Simplenote/ Notational Velocity as a front end…not sure which yet.

Itsycal: a calendar on the menu bar or Day-O/Fantastical

ihomework to keep track of the dredded

Kindle for Mac: for all those books you don’t want to carry

Dropbox: for files, along with a google account for

Google Docs

We’ll still need a quick local word job: Bean

For serious writing either Scrivener or Ulysses. I’m familiar with Scrivener, having it both on Mac and Windows machines, but Ulysses does look nice.

Skype, Adium, Chrome for communicating/web.

aText for text expansion
While we're on 'text', how about a plain 'ol text editor: Textwranger. There are others, but this is my favourite. 

Skim for PDF annotation, although watch out for the SourceForge malware/crapware.

VLC and Handbreak for media

EagleFiler for storing random stuff, DevonthinkPro Office for organized storing of stuff

Back up system: Crashplan has been well reviewed, but I’ll also look at: Backblaze, Carbonite…

The great void in the Mac world is for a cheap simple relational database system…not essential, but can be useful for collection and analysis of structured data…candidates are idatabase by Apimac, Kexi (an open source offering) or MySQL, but that’s complicated. Tap Forms? iList Data? Firebird?

GraphicConverter to convert graphics

Image editing. I’d like open source, but I can’t get past Photoshop Elements and Premier for hitting the price-performance sweet spot, but as it bloats, I may look elsewhere.

Audacity for sound processing (also Audio Hijack and Fission)

I’ve played around with a few search tools, as Spotlight is rather a blunt instrument; current favourite is Flashlight, but I used to use HoudaSpot, which was pretty good.

Hocus Focus to manage a screen full of windows.

Dictionary extension: Terminology

Stats package: Wizard standard, by Evan Miller

General maths; Mathematica (of course), student edition

Lastly, some hardware: a wireless scanner: Iriscan Book 3 Executive is just the ticket.

Ideally I’d like to have a tiny camera: lens linked by USB to the laptop. Useful for snapping the blackboard/whiteboard (if not smartboard).

Of course, some Bible software would be great too.

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!