Monday, May 5, 2003
Psst! Read this review about Pocket Informant 4.01!
Posted by Philip Colmer in "SOFTWARE" @ 08:00 AM
Web Information Solutions describes Pocket Informant as "The Original Premier PIM for the Pocket PC" ... but what is Pocket Informant and will it make a difference to your life if you used it? Let's take a look at the latest release and find out.
Pocket Informant, now in release 4, is a drop-in replacement for the Calendar, Contacts and Tasks applications on your Pocket PC. It's got some really neat features, some of which will be touched upon below, but the learning curve can be steep in places compared with the built-in applications. However, given the vast difference in functionality between them, that is only to be expected.
Installing ... and other things
Pocket Informant (referred to as PI from now on) is installed by running the supplied installation application. After getting past the introductory screens, the installer offers you a list of components to install, which include language resources for French, Spanish, German & Dutch. You can also install an icon manager, which is used for assigning icons to categories within PI, and documentation for PI. These are installed onto your PC and not the Pocket PC.
The installer warns you that PI should be installed onto main memory and not onto a storage card. This is because some storage cards take a while to get going and, if you've caused the Pocket PC to turn on by pressing a button associated with PI, it may cause the PDA to hang.
During the installation, you are given some options as to how tightly you want PI to integrate into the Pocket PC, from responding to the buttons on the device, to replacing the built-in applications when you click on the appropriate Start menu entries. Unfortunately, it looks as if this is an installation-time option and cannot be changed unless you reinstall the software. After installing the software to the PDA, the installer continues by pointing out some tips and tricks. I didn't particularly like this aspect of installation since the only way to remind yourself of the tips and tricks is to reinstall the software.
The documentation that gets installed primarily consists of two PDFs ... and they let down the otherwise good product. The "Feature Reference" document often refers to version three and sentences occasionally stop without having finished making the point. If there is a weak part of PI, this is it and that can only hurt new users, bearing in mind the steep learning curve.
After installation, you will probably want to spend a little bit of time going through the preferences part of the application. As you will see from Figure 1, there are a LOT to choose from! This is indicative of how configurable and customisable PI is. You will probably leave most of the items at their defaults, but the facility is there to tweak the odd setting or two if it takes your fancy.
Figure 1: Some of the preferences in Pocket Informant.
Keeping Track with the Calendar
As with the built-in calendar, PI offers a number of different ways of looking at your calendar information. The following few pictures show how the PI version (on the right) compares with the Microsoft version (on the left).
Figure 2 shows a specific date being looked at. Although the overall structure of the day layout isn't that different, there are some differences around the edges, notably:
Figure 2: Comparing a day in the two calendars.
Interestingly, in the example shown above, the built-in application manages to convey slightly more information than PI - the size of the blue rectangles show that the first meeting is only 30 minutes long, and the last meeting finishes at 4:30. PI can show this information if you choose to display the day view in 30 minute segments, but then you can't see the whole working day on the screen at once. As with most things, the choice is yours.
Figure 3 shows a week being looked at. This is significantly different and provides much more information than the built-in application's own version of this view. Clicking on the small triangle in the corner of the date heading expands that page to fill the screen. You've also got a wide range of options for customising the view, such as arranging the days vertically instead of horizontally (i.e., the days go downwards in the first column then the second column) or changing which day occupies the top slot in this view. You've got the option of fixing it to a specified day, or allowing it to always be "today".
Figure 3: Comparing a week in the two calendars.
Figure 4 shows a full month view. This takes the differences between what the built-in calendar offers and what PI offers even further than the week view. When PI first offered this method of looking at the calendar, some people thought that it was an implementation of DateLens, a.k.a. FishCal, primarily because of the way the calendar allows you to zoom into an entry, pushing other entries to one side, as shown in Figure 5. Whilst there are some similarities, they end at the initial zooming. The DateLens design offers more features than PI, but at the cost of being too slow for current Pocket PCs.
Figure 4: Comparing a month in the two calendars.
Figure 5: Drilling into the detail in the PI month view.
So, back to PI. As you can see from Figures 4 & 5, this application really does make the calendar more useful than the built-in version. Even when you've zoomed into a day's detail, the rest of the calendar still shows how your time in adjacent days is broken down, represented by the small rectangles of various shades of blue.
The final PI calendar view is the agenda view, shown in Figure 6. Unlike the built-in calendar, where you only see one day at a time, with PI you've got the choice of 1, 3, 5, 7 or, indeed, any number you want to see at a time. This is a really convenient way of seeing when you are busy if you prefer this approach to a more pictorial representation.
Figure 6: Upcoming activities
I've got tasks to do?
The tasks component offers a sometimes bewildering number of ways of managing and looking at your tasks. Figure 7 shows just one of the views, which is very similar to the view offered by the built-in tasks application. Starting at the top and going down, there is the ability to search through your tasks, a summary of the task statistics (10 tasks, 1 overdue, none due today, none urgent and none low importance), followed by the tasks and a similar set of icons at the bottom to those offered by the calendar component.
Figure 7: Comparing the task views.
The documentation doesn't directly explain the layout, though, which means that you've either got to play with the software to try to figure it out for yourself, or read through the documentation trying to find a feature that refers to the part of the layout you are concerned with.
An example is the black dots present at the end of each entry ... except for the entry that is red in Figure 7, which shows [1/16]. So, is that 1 out of 16? No, it turns out it is a date - 16th Jan. This is the due date of the task. So what are the black dots? Careful reading of the documentation explains that you can click on them to set the date of the task, but if you didn't normally set dates on your tasks, how would you know what the dots were for? What the documentation really could do with is a screenshot of the overall view and some indicators showing what everything means or is used for.
The software comes with some powerful preset filters that allow you to very quickly come to grips with managing your tasks. The filters include "start/due on date", "in progress", "start/end today", "overdue" and "undated", amongst others.
PI offers a new tasks feature that the core applications don't support - hierarchical tasks. An example is shown in Figure 8. You can drag a task onto another task to make it a child of that task or you can opt to create a new task as a child of the selected task.
Figure 8: Hierarchical tasks
This is undoubtedly a powerful feature and one that starts taking PI deeper into the realm of project management. However, there are two problems with it:[list=1]You can't use it if you've got the display set to group the tasks by category. You can drag and drop tasks as much as you like, but it won't create a hierarchical task. I wasted a LOT of time trying to figure out why my dragging wasn't having the desired dropping result.
The relationship between the tasks is stored in a file on the Pocket PC. Everything else that PI shows you is accessed through the Outlook synchronisation data, and so is automatically synchronised back to your PC and Outlook. By using a file, that model is broken and you've got to take extra steps to ensure that the file is backed up, otherwise you run the risk of losing the hierarchy you've set up.[/list]Who Shall I Contact Next?
Figure 9 compares the contacts view in the built-in applications and PI. As you can see, the PI view is very similar to the built-in view. You've again got choices as to how the contacts are organised (First name, Last name, Company, etc). One area where I think the built-in application scores over PI, though, is in the view shown. You can quite clearly see which phone number you are looking at for that person (work, home or mobile), and you can click on the letter to see the other numbers very easily. In PI, however, you don't get that overview and you've got to click on the entry to see the whole offering.
Figure 9: Comparing the Contacts views.
What PI does do over the built-in application, though, is integrate tightly with other devices to make it easy for you to ring a contact, e.g. via Bluetooth on your mobile phone.
Picking Dates and Times
When you've got a screen as small as that of the Pocket PC, time spent on getting the user interface right is time well spent. A good example of this is the way that PI allows you to pick dates and times for calendar entries and tasks, compared to the built-in applications. Figure 10 shows the date entry choices. In PI, the default is to show 6 months at a time. If you have trouble reading this, it is possible to reduce it to 2 months by clicking on the "2" in the top right-hand corner. What I really like, though, is the thought that has gone into the time selection, as shown in Figure 11. Most events start on the hour or a 15 minute portion thereof, and the layout of the time picker reflects that bias.
Figure 10: Date entry
Figure 11: Time entry
Linking It All Together
The final difference between PI & the core applications that I want to look at in this review is links. PI allows you to take an entry in your calendar, contacts or tasks, and link it to any other entry in your calendar, contacts or tasks, or even to a file on your Pocket PC. Figure 12 shows a contact with an existing link to a calendar entry and a link to a task entry being added.
Figure 12: Setting up links.
Once an entry has got links, you can display the entry, click on the links tab, click on the relevant link and you are taken straight to that linked item. If the links are between objects that PI manages (i.e. calendar, tasks & contacts) then the links are automatically made two-way. In other words, if you add a link to a contact for a calendar entry, bringing up the calendar entry will show a link to the contact.
Gotchas
There is one major gotcha with this product - the poor documentation. Web Information Solutions clearly needs to junk the documentation it's got so far and spend a serious amount of time writing it from scratch, remembering to cater to both the beginner and the advanced user.
Where To Buy
The software can be downloaded from Handango or purchased for $24.95 (affiliate link).
Specifications
This software works with both Pocket PC 2000 and 2002 devices. It takes up 1897 KB of RAM on the device. Although it can be installed to a storage card, it is not recommended for the reasons given near the beginning of this review.
Conclusions
I haven't looked at absolutely every feature of Pocket Information in this review. Instead, what I've tried to do is show how and where the user interface of PI is better than that of the built-in applications. From that, I hope you can decide whether or not it would meet your needs.
This is clearly a very powerful and well designed piece of software, and one that will take time to master and to get the most out of it. If WIS can get the documentation right, they've got an absolute winner on their hands.
Pocket Informant, now in release 4, is a drop-in replacement for the Calendar, Contacts and Tasks applications on your Pocket PC. It's got some really neat features, some of which will be touched upon below, but the learning curve can be steep in places compared with the built-in applications. However, given the vast difference in functionality between them, that is only to be expected.
Installing ... and other things
Pocket Informant (referred to as PI from now on) is installed by running the supplied installation application. After getting past the introductory screens, the installer offers you a list of components to install, which include language resources for French, Spanish, German & Dutch. You can also install an icon manager, which is used for assigning icons to categories within PI, and documentation for PI. These are installed onto your PC and not the Pocket PC.
The installer warns you that PI should be installed onto main memory and not onto a storage card. This is because some storage cards take a while to get going and, if you've caused the Pocket PC to turn on by pressing a button associated with PI, it may cause the PDA to hang.
During the installation, you are given some options as to how tightly you want PI to integrate into the Pocket PC, from responding to the buttons on the device, to replacing the built-in applications when you click on the appropriate Start menu entries. Unfortunately, it looks as if this is an installation-time option and cannot be changed unless you reinstall the software. After installing the software to the PDA, the installer continues by pointing out some tips and tricks. I didn't particularly like this aspect of installation since the only way to remind yourself of the tips and tricks is to reinstall the software.
The documentation that gets installed primarily consists of two PDFs ... and they let down the otherwise good product. The "Feature Reference" document often refers to version three and sentences occasionally stop without having finished making the point. If there is a weak part of PI, this is it and that can only hurt new users, bearing in mind the steep learning curve.
After installation, you will probably want to spend a little bit of time going through the preferences part of the application. As you will see from Figure 1, there are a LOT to choose from! This is indicative of how configurable and customisable PI is. You will probably leave most of the items at their defaults, but the facility is there to tweak the odd setting or two if it takes your fancy.
Figure 1: Some of the preferences in Pocket Informant.
Keeping Track with the Calendar
As with the built-in calendar, PI offers a number of different ways of looking at your calendar information. The following few pictures show how the PI version (on the right) compares with the Microsoft version (on the left).
Figure 2 shows a specific date being looked at. Although the overall structure of the day layout isn't that different, there are some differences around the edges, notably:
- The top of the screen shows how the day is used, providing an overview of where you've got free time.
White blocks represent non-work hours, while yellow blocks represent work hours. The first thick black bar is the start of the day, the next black bar is midday and the third is the end of the day. The two small triangles indicate where the main view of the screen starts and ends in the day. Clicking in the blocks moves the main view to that part of the day. - The right-hand side provides easy access to different calendar views and navigation through time and days. Clicking on the red arrows, for example, allows you to move up and down through the day - an alternative to using the feature described above.
- The bottom portion of the screen provides easy access to the different modules (calendar, notes, tasks, contacts and search) whilst the icons below those partly stay the same and partly offer module-specific features such as filtering.
Figure 2: Comparing a day in the two calendars.
Interestingly, in the example shown above, the built-in application manages to convey slightly more information than PI - the size of the blue rectangles show that the first meeting is only 30 minutes long, and the last meeting finishes at 4:30. PI can show this information if you choose to display the day view in 30 minute segments, but then you can't see the whole working day on the screen at once. As with most things, the choice is yours.
Figure 3 shows a week being looked at. This is significantly different and provides much more information than the built-in application's own version of this view. Clicking on the small triangle in the corner of the date heading expands that page to fill the screen. You've also got a wide range of options for customising the view, such as arranging the days vertically instead of horizontally (i.e., the days go downwards in the first column then the second column) or changing which day occupies the top slot in this view. You've got the option of fixing it to a specified day, or allowing it to always be "today".
Figure 3: Comparing a week in the two calendars.
Figure 4 shows a full month view. This takes the differences between what the built-in calendar offers and what PI offers even further than the week view. When PI first offered this method of looking at the calendar, some people thought that it was an implementation of DateLens, a.k.a. FishCal, primarily because of the way the calendar allows you to zoom into an entry, pushing other entries to one side, as shown in Figure 5. Whilst there are some similarities, they end at the initial zooming. The DateLens design offers more features than PI, but at the cost of being too slow for current Pocket PCs.
Figure 4: Comparing a month in the two calendars.
Figure 5: Drilling into the detail in the PI month view.
So, back to PI. As you can see from Figures 4 & 5, this application really does make the calendar more useful than the built-in version. Even when you've zoomed into a day's detail, the rest of the calendar still shows how your time in adjacent days is broken down, represented by the small rectangles of various shades of blue.
The final PI calendar view is the agenda view, shown in Figure 6. Unlike the built-in calendar, where you only see one day at a time, with PI you've got the choice of 1, 3, 5, 7 or, indeed, any number you want to see at a time. This is a really convenient way of seeing when you are busy if you prefer this approach to a more pictorial representation.
Figure 6: Upcoming activities
I've got tasks to do?
The tasks component offers a sometimes bewildering number of ways of managing and looking at your tasks. Figure 7 shows just one of the views, which is very similar to the view offered by the built-in tasks application. Starting at the top and going down, there is the ability to search through your tasks, a summary of the task statistics (10 tasks, 1 overdue, none due today, none urgent and none low importance), followed by the tasks and a similar set of icons at the bottom to those offered by the calendar component.
Figure 7: Comparing the task views.
The documentation doesn't directly explain the layout, though, which means that you've either got to play with the software to try to figure it out for yourself, or read through the documentation trying to find a feature that refers to the part of the layout you are concerned with.
An example is the black dots present at the end of each entry ... except for the entry that is red in Figure 7, which shows [1/16]. So, is that 1 out of 16? No, it turns out it is a date - 16th Jan. This is the due date of the task. So what are the black dots? Careful reading of the documentation explains that you can click on them to set the date of the task, but if you didn't normally set dates on your tasks, how would you know what the dots were for? What the documentation really could do with is a screenshot of the overall view and some indicators showing what everything means or is used for.
The software comes with some powerful preset filters that allow you to very quickly come to grips with managing your tasks. The filters include "start/due on date", "in progress", "start/end today", "overdue" and "undated", amongst others.
PI offers a new tasks feature that the core applications don't support - hierarchical tasks. An example is shown in Figure 8. You can drag a task onto another task to make it a child of that task or you can opt to create a new task as a child of the selected task.
Figure 8: Hierarchical tasks
This is undoubtedly a powerful feature and one that starts taking PI deeper into the realm of project management. However, there are two problems with it:[list=1]
Figure 9 compares the contacts view in the built-in applications and PI. As you can see, the PI view is very similar to the built-in view. You've again got choices as to how the contacts are organised (First name, Last name, Company, etc). One area where I think the built-in application scores over PI, though, is in the view shown. You can quite clearly see which phone number you are looking at for that person (work, home or mobile), and you can click on the letter to see the other numbers very easily. In PI, however, you don't get that overview and you've got to click on the entry to see the whole offering.
Figure 9: Comparing the Contacts views.
What PI does do over the built-in application, though, is integrate tightly with other devices to make it easy for you to ring a contact, e.g. via Bluetooth on your mobile phone.
Picking Dates and Times
When you've got a screen as small as that of the Pocket PC, time spent on getting the user interface right is time well spent. A good example of this is the way that PI allows you to pick dates and times for calendar entries and tasks, compared to the built-in applications. Figure 10 shows the date entry choices. In PI, the default is to show 6 months at a time. If you have trouble reading this, it is possible to reduce it to 2 months by clicking on the "2" in the top right-hand corner. What I really like, though, is the thought that has gone into the time selection, as shown in Figure 11. Most events start on the hour or a 15 minute portion thereof, and the layout of the time picker reflects that bias.
Figure 10: Date entry
Figure 11: Time entry
Linking It All Together
The final difference between PI & the core applications that I want to look at in this review is links. PI allows you to take an entry in your calendar, contacts or tasks, and link it to any other entry in your calendar, contacts or tasks, or even to a file on your Pocket PC. Figure 12 shows a contact with an existing link to a calendar entry and a link to a task entry being added.
Figure 12: Setting up links.
Once an entry has got links, you can display the entry, click on the links tab, click on the relevant link and you are taken straight to that linked item. If the links are between objects that PI manages (i.e. calendar, tasks & contacts) then the links are automatically made two-way. In other words, if you add a link to a contact for a calendar entry, bringing up the calendar entry will show a link to the contact.
Gotchas
There is one major gotcha with this product - the poor documentation. Web Information Solutions clearly needs to junk the documentation it's got so far and spend a serious amount of time writing it from scratch, remembering to cater to both the beginner and the advanced user.
Where To Buy
The software can be downloaded from Handango or purchased for $24.95 (affiliate link).
Specifications
This software works with both Pocket PC 2000 and 2002 devices. It takes up 1897 KB of RAM on the device. Although it can be installed to a storage card, it is not recommended for the reasons given near the beginning of this review.
Conclusions
I haven't looked at absolutely every feature of Pocket Information in this review. Instead, what I've tried to do is show how and where the user interface of PI is better than that of the built-in applications. From that, I hope you can decide whether or not it would meet your needs.
This is clearly a very powerful and well designed piece of software, and one that will take time to master and to get the most out of it. If WIS can get the documentation right, they've got an absolute winner on their hands.
