Home
Reviews
ActionNames Datebook 5
December 4, 2001
If you’ve never heard of AN before, let me give you a little background information. It, along with DateBk4, is one of the most popular applications for the Palm OS platform. It vastly improves upon the built in programs by allowing you to link addresses to meetings, calls, and to dos, add icons and color coding to events to make them easier to see, and adds powerful agenda, weekly, monthly, and quarterly views to make your information easier to see and organize—and that’s just the beginning. AN was the very first Palm OS application I ever bought, way back in 1999 when I got my IIIx, and it was worth every single penny.The improvements that AN5 bring to the table are numerous, including support for large fonts and multiline display of meetings and to dos, so that you don’t have to open up each individual item in order to see all of the details. You can also set default icons and colors for different categories of to dos, and different colors for different categories of contacts. That makes it possible to see at a glance exactly what you have coming up in any given day or week if you have a Palm OS device with a color display. If you’re lucky enough to have a Sony Clie, you’ll also get hi-res support. And regardless of the device you have, you can now map your hard buttons to cycle through the various AN views.
But the largest improvement, IMHO, has got to be the contact history function. Just hold your stylus down on any contact for just a second to get the pop up context menu, then tap on Contact History. Up pops a list of every single meeting, to do, and call related to that contact, and you can tap on any item in the list to go straight to that entry. That’s a feature that a lot of people have been asking for, and it’s quite powerful. It allows you to review everything that’s been going on before meeting with a client, and it also provides you with some rudimentary project planning ability. You can set up a particular project as a new contact by typing something descriptive in the Company field and then start linking that new “contact” to various meetings and to dos that are associated with it. You can then use the Contact History view to see exactly where you stand and what still needs to be done.
Unfortunately there are still a few bugs creeping around the code that detract only slightly from my praise of this latest iteration of my favorite program. I’ve been getting new beta builds at least twice daily for the last couple of weeks, and while almost every single problem has been fixed there are still a few more that are waiting for resolution. Some of them the engineers haven’t been able to reproduce yet, so maybe it’s just me, but I thought that you guys should know. Please note that the final release I just received addressed those problems, and I have been unable to find any more bugs.
One thing I dislike about this new release is the way that it handles the creation of new To Dos. In previous versions of AN, when you created a new to do the default date was either the current date (if you were looking at today’s agenda) or the date to which you had navigated (if you were scheduling a future to do). Now the default is to no date at all, which necessitates some extra work to choose the due date for the item. Most of the beta testers seem to dislike this new behavior and I’m currently lobbying iambic for a change back to the old method, or at least a preference option so that the user can decide what works best. If iambic would change this one little thing, I would instantly change my rating to “5 PocketGoddesses.”
I’ve said many times that ActionNamesDatebook is without a doubt the best replacement I can find for the built in PIM programs in the Palm OS. It’s intuitive, easy to use, and powerful. And the President of iambic Software, Vidal Graupera, has personally promised the AN mailing list on Yahoo Groups that even more improvement is coming in the near future. If you haven’t tried it before, AN5 gives you even more reasons to do so, and I suggest that you take advantage of the free 30 day trial available at the iambic web site. Current users can upgrade for $9.95, while new users can get a full license for $19.95 directly from iambic Software.
PocketGoddess Rating for ActionNamesDatebook: 
