Yes, your PDA, cellphone, BlackBerry, or whatever it is you carry around in your pocket probably came with a calendar and contact manager. And they probably suck. Pocket Informant doesn't.

This personal information management suite was originally designed as a complete replacement for the PIM applications that come with Windows Mobile. It's now available for iPhone and BlackBerry devices as well.

The Pocket Informant calendar is nothing short of awesome. It offers agenda, day, week, and month views that are quite frankly more useful than anything you'll find in Outlook or Google Calendar. And they just happen to fit beautifully on a small screen. You can easily see at a glance how much free and busy time you have in a day. And you can link appointments to contacts, set reminders, and show tasks from your To Do list in your calendar.

Pocket Informant's search utility also puts the built in Windows Mobile search function to shame. Results appear almost instantly, and you can find top level information like a contact's name or phone number, or results that are buried down a bit deeper like a name mentioned in a note attached to a calendar item from a year ago.

Pocket Informant for Windows Mobile costs $29.95. The BlackBerry and iPhone/iPod touch versions are each $20.

About six years ago Mitch Kapor, the guy behind Lotus 1-2-3, started a new open source project called Chandler. The goal was simple enough: Create an personal information management tool that would allow users to store, share, and collaborate. It would have things like a calendar, address book, and to do list.

In other words, Chandler is a lot like Microsoft Outlook. But there are a few major differences:

1. Chandler is open source
2. Chandler works with Windows, Mac, and Linux and has a web interface
3. You can sync your Chandler tasks with an online server and share them with others

Overall the interface of the desktop and web clients is pretty, but not necessarily intuitive. For example, there's a nice big text entry box at the top of the application that you would think would be for searching. But it's primary use is for entering new tasks. Type something into that box and a new task is created. If you want to use the text area as a search box, you need to type "/f" before entering your query.
Is Chandler kind of useful? Sure. Is it an Outlook killer? Maybe. Was it worth a six year wait? Maybe not. But now that it's here, Kapor says it's up to the open source community to continue developing the project. And I've learned never to understimate the open source community. If there's a will, there's a way, and this application could be the future of collaborative task management. On the other hand, it's not entirely clear if there's a will at the moment.

What do you think? Is Chandler the wave of the future, or should Kapor have given up on it years ago?

There are two complaints we've had with Windows Mobile since before the operating system was even called Windows Mobile:

1. The X button at the top of a screen doesn't close a window, it just minimizes it.
2. The calendar/contacts/notes applications are horrible.

There are plenty of free third-party add-ons that address the first issue. But if you want a better personal information management suite than the one that comes with Windows Mobile, you're going to have to get out your wallet. Agenda Fusion, Pocket Informant, Agendus, and several other applications are excellent PIM replacements. Each has enhanced search features, a more useful calendar week-view, and better integration of tasks, notes, calendars, and contacts. But each of these applications also costs a few bucks.

Pocket Informant has long been one of our favorites, but the latest version costs a whopping $35. Sure, it's worth it, but if you're on a budget, you might look at the price tag, look at your Smartphone and decide the built-in calendar isn't that bad.

But Jan 4th and 5th you can get Pocket Informant for free. The makers of Pocket Informant have partnered online PDA software retailer MobiHand to give away free copies of the software for the next two days. Just use the code PIFREE at checkout to get your free copy. Be forewarned, when we tried to download the application this morning, MobiHand's site was performing very slowly, but slow and steady wins the race. We were able to download and register Pocket Informant 7. The software should work with all Windows Mobile 2003 and newer devices.

[via AximSite]

Looking for a good replacement for the built-in contacts, calendar, and tasks applications on your Windows Mobile PDA or phone, but don't feel like shelling out $20 to $30? Handango's got you covered. Well, today anyway.

The mobile software store is offering up a free copy of Agendus for Windows Mobile today only. Agendus is a popular personal information manager that made a name for itself on PalmOS. Last year, Iambic decided to port the application to Windows Mobile.

While it may not have the name recognition of Agenda Fusion or Pocket Informant, Agendus does pack a bunch of features missing from Windows Mobile's default PIM suite. For example, you get more detailed week and month views, icons, and better integration of tasks, calendar, and contacts.

Usually a full license would set you back $25.

If you've dropped $700 on an iLiad eBook reader, it may have occurred to you at one point or another that this is a lot of money for a device that basically does two things: lets you read books and take notes in the margins.

But one enterprising member of the MobileRead forums has taken it upon himself to add the feature set of a really old Palm Pilot to the iLiad. To be more precise, he's ported several personal information management tools from the GPE handheld Linux suite to run on the iLiad.

The suite includes a calendar, contact manager and to do list. There's no way to synchronize this data with your computer at the moment. But perhaps you'll be able to convince your significant other that it's worth buying a digital eBook reader if you can sell your Palm Pilot*.

[via jkOnTheRun]

*We wouldn't recommend replacing your Palm Pilot with an eBook reader. Might we recommend something in a nice Palm Treo flavor? Or perhaps an Apple iPhone, Samsung BlackJack, or even a used Dell Axim from eBay?

After all that teasing, 37signals has flipped the switch on a major upgrade to Backpack, their incredibly popular web-based PIM service that can store and organize lists, notes, pictures and files. As if features like sharing / collaboration and mobile phone access weren't cool enough, this major release takes Backpack productivity to entirely new heights.


One of the most interesting on the list of new changes is a much-updated UI, from a movement of the toolbar to the top of the pages (pictured) to the much-requested ability to drag and drop any list, note, pictures or file from one page to another. While the toolbar's new location initially feels like a good move, we find ourselves missing the authority of the previous design, as the buttons to create new lists and notes stood out a bit better.


Almost as drool-worthy as drag and drop abilities, users can now also search across all their Backpack pages. A new searchbox mounted in the upper right (directly underneath the 'Make a new page' button) should satisfy most users who use Backpack for more than a few tidbits of info. Searching seems pretty zippy, and your search term is highlighted among the listed results.

Continuing the healthy list of changes are other welcome new features, such as multiple photo galleries per page and RSS feeds for shared pages so you can keep an eye on changes made by everyone else. Altogether, this is a great update and we're very satisfied with the new features. With accounts ranging in price from 'free' up to $14/month, we recommend Backpack more than ever for anyone from casual users who need a simple web-based locker for storing bits and pieces of their daily adventures, to power users with a serious case of GTD or project management on their back.

Yea, that's right, we used an exclamation point (!) in a post headline - that's how excited we are that 37signals just released a new preview post and video demo of one of the most-requested Backpack features ever: moving items to different pages. Especially appealing to the GTD crowd, the ability to move items between pages will blow open the doors on Backpack's usefulness for everything from keeping useful tidbits of info handy (even on your mobile phone) to managing projects and robust todo lists. Anything will be draggable from one page to another - notes, files, pictures and lists - and you can even drop an item on the 'Make a new page' button. Items dropped onto a page will be placed at the top of said page, easy to find and organize at a later date.

If you can't wait for the new Backpack to debut (though a scheduled maintenance alert warns that the service will be down tomorrow night at 10 pm Central Time), 37signals has even provided a demo video (in QuickTime) of the new feature in action. Note, however, that the Backpack in the video is running in a slower development mode, so the live version should apparently function with a bit more zip once they flip the switch.

On behalf of Backpack users everywhere, 37signals, we at Download Squad would like to thank you for answering the call.

Well that didn't take long; apparently Plaxo was planning to launch their public beta a bit sooner than we thought. Whereby 'sooner' we mean 'right now'; the company has just opened the Plaxo 3.0 doors to a public beta for one and all to sign up. Still offering most services as free, Plaxo is inarguably positioning themselves as the incontestable leader of synchronizing not only your own contacts and calendars, but also the information your contacts change in their own address books.

If you aren't up for trying out the 3.0 beta, perhaps a demo video and brief review from the omni-present Robert Scoble will give you enough information to help you lean towards one side of the fence or the other. Scoble has some of the same great things to say about Plaxo as we did, though he's running into some sluggish and flaky synching quirks (hence the all-too-disclaimer-ing beta badge). Nevertheless, it's clear that Plaxo has a great thing going, so stay tuned for a more in-depth look soon.

Stikkit, the web-based PIM that thinks, has gained a few significant upgrades in the form of very, very powerful contact-related PIM management, as well as a couple of impressive new bookmarklets stikklets. First up is "a complete do-over" of peeps (that's Stikklet speak for 'contacts') that brings a relational aspect to keeping track of who, what, when and where. They produced a long screencast that demos the slew of Stikkit's new abilities which include updating a contact's information if new info is ever mentioned in another stikkit, aggregating related stikkit's on a peep's page such as emails and appointments you paste (or forward to) a stikkit, and a whole lot more. They definitely meant that "complete do-over" comment, so check out the screencast for all the new peeps stuff.

Last but by no means least on the list of big updates are two new 'stikklets' that let you add stikkits to your account from any page you're visiting. The first stikklet has the impressive effect of opening a new stikkit right on top of the page you're looking at, while the second opens in a popup window. Both of them can snag any text you highlighted and offer full editing (and Stikkit's impressive 'thinking') capabilities before you save and go on about your uninterrupted business. These two bookmarklets are sure to be handy tools for the online PIM power users in the audience.

If you're looking to learn more about this new web service, check out Stikkit.com (while not logged in, of course) and the company's blog, as they have linked a number of introductory screencasts, case studies and customer testimonials which should all help you wrap your head around what's possible with this most unique of PIM systems.

Iambic has launched a beta for a Pocket PC version of its popular organization program Agendus.

Agendus is a personal information management (PIM) suite for PalmOS that offers a complete replacement for the default calendar, contact, and notes programs. Like most PIM programs, Agendus offers a choice of multiple views, color schemes, and icons for sorting through their data. Along with Datebk, it's one of the more popular PIM suites for Palm.

The Windows Mobile market is currently dominated by Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant. I'll be curious to see whether there's room for another PIM suite in the Windows Mobile world. There are already a number of also-ran programs vying for third place in the popularity contest. Ulti-Planner is a light-weight PIM program, and Pen Agenda offers a clean look for a low price, but neither gets the kind of attention that Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant do.

What I think is really a shame is that there's such a large market for 3rd party calendar/contacts/notes programs. Considering these are the functions that most casual PDA users are looking for when they pick up a device, it seems a bit silly that the default features of Windows Mobile PDAs leave so much to be desired. The month and week views in Pocket Outlook's calendar couldn't be much less useful. And it doesn't look like Microsoft has any plans to change much in the next version of Windows Mobile.

We mentioned Stikkit, a new sort of online PIM with a twist, earlier this month, and one of my favorite bloggers on all things Mac and design, John Gruber, has gone and reviewed the crap out of it. It's a long read but worthwhile, especially if you're interested in the finer details the company focused on. John explores the format of the notes and the syntax with which they're created, pointing out the differences, for example, between bookmarks, notes and lists, and offering examples of how these notes are written.

If you're the cliff-notes type, however, I'll just skip to the end: while John reveals some cleverness in Stikkit, he ultimately finds it to be "a very good implementation of a flawed premise." Strange UI features (such as AJAX Everywhere™ technology in favor of linkable pages and notes) and behavioral limitations (like not being able to add more than one bookmark to a note) deflate an otherwise interesting concept.

Personally, while it admittedly isn't a free solution, I still find a Backpack account combined with the excellent syncing/offline Packrat client (Mac OS X only) to still be the king of the hill. If you haven't signed up yet, check out John's revue for more than you need to know about Stikkit.