Introduction
The need of a personal information manager (PIM) has become quite essential
today, whether to organize appointments, tasks or to quickly locate a contact or
enter details efficiently. Currently there are two main award winning software
that operates on windows mobile, Pocket Informant and Agenda Fusion. We have
decided to review Agenda Fusion.
Objectives
Emphasize to the end user the need of a PIM and explain to a certain extent how
to interact with your PDA’s screen and choose interfaces, input methods, and
most importantly save time by working more productively.
Note:
-
This article is not intended to compare
between Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant or any other PIM software, and
show any favoritism to anyone, instead it is intended to give a broad
general understanding of the need of such software in PDAs and cover some
features of Agenda Fusion.
-
Most examples are based on windows mobile 2003
2nd edition and Agenda Fusion version 7.85. There are some minor
alternations when operating in a windows mobile 5.0 environment. Microsoft
Outlook 2002 will be referred as our desktop counterpart client in some
examples.
Let’s start!
The most common components in Agenda Fusion are appointments, tasks, notes,
contacts and projects. With the exception of projects, all of these are present
in the corresponding desktop version of Microsoft Outlook. One thing to mention,
sometimes it is difficult to distinguish between an appointment and a task. An
appointment is a job that has a definite date and time. No two appointments can
take place at the same time. Accordingly, when entering an appointment that
conflicts with another, the desktop PC will notify or alert the user. Tasks are
jobs that need to be done, but with no exact timings. So it is possible to have
several tasks running at the same time. In order to clarify things more, have a
look at those couple of examples.
Appointments:
-
Meeting with Ms. Smith (kid’s teacher) at
Dundee High School (location) at 8:30AM on January 3rd, 2006
(specific time and date)
-
Visit Dr. Robert (dentist) in his downtown
office (location) at 10:15AM on January 3rd, 2006 (specific time
and date)
Looking at the above examples, it is impossible to have two appointments at the
same time and that’s why no overlapping is allowed.
Tasks:
-
Pay (the task) the credit card bill somewhere
between February 1st, 2006 (start date) till February 9th
(Due date)
-
Tide up (the task) the garage somewhere
between February 5th 2006 (start date) up to February 28th,
2006 (due date) which is the date that the wife had swear not to let you in
the bedroom if the garage is not done.
It
is quite obvious, that those two tasks must be done somewhere between the start
date up to the due date. Some kind of freedom is there in choosing what to do
first, however the deadlines (due date) are present as well.
The most two interesting things in Agenda Fusion are the ability to customize
every aspect and screen of the program and being friendly user. Those were the
same reasons why Microsoft Windows OS got so popular! This picture is the today
screen with 2 rows of buttons. The first seven are the calendar view but in
different formats, today, hourly day, hourly week, week, agenda, month, year.
Then you have tasks, contacts, notes, and finally projects.
The second row has the new button, and the universal Agenda Fusion menu, in
which everything can be customized. On its right, there are two quick launch
buttons for making a new appointment and making a new task. These two buttons
changes according to the current view. Next to it is the “select date” button
that launches a small month calendar view in which it quickly let you go to any
desired date. The last funnel is the filter button that does what it sounds
like, filtering according to some user defined preferences.
On
the upper right of almost all views, a definition view icon with a drop down
menu is there. The drop menu allows to use the entire buttons in the first row
but in a drop list format. It might sounds funny, however I prefer hiding the
entire first row and having them replaced with this tinny drop list, to save
space on my screen view.
This is my favorite view in Agenda Fusion. One quick look at the “month view”
gives a great estimation on the upcoming days. Look at the Visa icons on the
first and the 7th. This indicates a running task that starts on the
first of this month and is due on the 7th. Having a lot of icons is
very important. Agenda Fusion itself has around 500 built-in icons. There are a
number of companies that provide icons for PIM software, one of them is
DesignedByBert that has 500 icons in four sizes [ 9X10 for 240X240 screens,
12X12 for 240X320 screens, 24X24 for 480X640 screens and a funny 18X20 for an
unknown screen size]. Another company is
Comoqi that provides another 500 colorful icons. Both companies group their
icons in category folders so that it will become easy to locate icons that match
different needs.
When it comes to installing icons to the PDA it is very important to select the
right destination where icons will be stored in. In general most PDAs have the
ROM, RAM, and the storage media card (could be SD, mini SD, MMC, or any other
storage media). Storing icons in the RAM will reduced the space needed by
programs to perform healthy, on the other hand storing icons in the storage
media is not a wise idea because the media itself is divided to small partitions
and each icon’s size is much smaller than these partitions. So what will happen
is a big loss in space on the storage media will occur, especially when
installing hundreds of icons and the memory card is almost getting full. That
leaves us with one choice only, the ROM; where there are no partitions. Hence
the best location to store icons is the ROM of a device.
It
is quite impossible to talk about PIM software without mentioning categories.
Organizing appointments, tasks, contacts and notes in categories saves a lot of
time. Moreover defines a new view on the desktop Outlook when sorting items
under a category view.
By
time, and with the help of the large memory of PDAs, the end user intend to
store any contact to avoid looking it up once again or having to dial the
directory service. The alphabet tabs or search field might sound a little bit
tedious or time consuming since it involves using the stylus and here comes in
the power of categories. As mentioned earlier, Agenda Fusion is so powerful when
it comes to customization, and there is an option to link all outlook links to
Agenda Fusion. So when the contact icon is tapped in the phone screen, a view
like the left picture appears. By simply using the 5 way pad of the PDA,
categories can be expanded and collapsed, and by pressing left and right,
alternative contact numbers (like home, mobile, work, e-mail) of a particular
contact will appear. Keep on pressing the centre button opens the menu in the
right picture with the “Dial selected number” at the top and clicking the centre
button once again will dial the selected number of a particular contact.
Categories are not only used in contacts, they can
be used in tasks, appointments, notes, and projects too. Having more than 1500
icons makes it hard to dig in and find an appropriate icon each time. The
desktop Outlook 2002 version has the ability to assign colors to different
categories. Accordingly the month view on the desktop Outlook will be having
different colors (see picture below). To find out how this works, in Outlook
2002, click on the calendar view and under the Edit menu, choose “Automatic
formatting”. Colors can be assigned to different categories.
Unfortunately ActiveSync does not synchronize categories, and there is no
import/export options on either the desktop or PDA. But there is always some
“Work Around” to export categories to the desktop Outlook!
Both the PDA and the desktop Outlook have separate categories. If categories
already exist on the PDA and the objective is to export them to the desktop
simply follow these simple steps. On the desktop, create a dummy new
appointment, and in the lower right click on categories. Click on “Master
category list” and delete all preset categories. By this, all categories on the
desktop have been removed and the only thing left is to import the PDA
categories in. Now on the PDA, create a dummy appointment. Assign all the
categories that the PDA has to that dummy appointment and let it synchronize to
the desktop. From the desktop, open that dummy appointment, click on categories
again and select all the categories in the upper field “ Item(s) belong to these
categories” and copy them and click on add to list to paste all the categories.
If any new categories are needed to be added, it is a good idea to create an
appointment within the desktop Outlook and add that category from the “Master
category list”. After synchronization is done, that category will be on the PDA,
but with no assigned icon. Once there, choose an appropriate icon and it’s done!
At this stage, the “Automatic formatting” that was mentioned earlier is
possible.
Templates are simple macros, instead of feeding an
appointment or task with frequent information, save them to templates. For
example visiting an orthodontist every 2 months is a frequent even. The title of
the appointment, preferred time of visit, office location, contact details and
category are fixed data and can be saved in a template. Opening this template
will open a new appointment and all these data already filled. Simply enter the
date of your next appointment and check if your next appointment has the same
timing.
Power text is another sort of templates that allows frequent phrases or text
notes to be stored.
Each view has its own filters. As mentioned earlier, categories can be used for
all items. For a view like the contact picture earlier, contacts are viewed
according to categories. If no filter is applied, all categories including
appointment categories will show up in the contact view with (0) indicating no
contact falling within this group. Setting a filter with pre-defined categories
will remove all (0) groups and will show only the contacts which were defined in
the filter.
Agenda Fusion is a tremendous program. It is hard to cover all options and
views. An in depth manual can be located at
Agenda Fusion site.
It is impossible to cover all features of Agenda
Fusion and it’s so nice to explore options. There are a lot of features, like
backup, coloring, alarm notes, projects, contact details view, and much more.
Contacting the developer is simply a pleasure, requesting new features,
reporting bugs, checking for updates and upgrades. I have been using Agenda
Fusion for more than a year and a half and everyday I discover a new feature
that makes me love it more and more. The frequency of appointments and tasks
varies from once person to another whether hourly, weekly views or monthly. It
is simply all about preferences. The ability to customize everything to suit
everybody in Agenda Fusion is one of the main reasons that made this software a
success. Give it a try and feel free to share your thoughts with us.
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