Palm Treo Phone
Website Work
PIM Project
Nokia N800
Asus eeePC
Adventures in Linux
My Search For the Ultimate Personal Information Manager
Microsoft Outlook
It is apparently because Gates has gotten such widespread
distribution of this program that some of the information
managers seem to be giving up. I don't have a copy of Outlook
yet, because I'm waiting until I get my new computer to move on
to Office 97. I understand that this program goes a long way
toward achieving the "Universal Address Book" function.
I just read a list of upgrades to this program, and many of them
are to make the E-mail portion as nice as the Outlook Express
E-mail client that I have been using since I got Internet
Explorer 4.0 on the first day that program became available.
2/7/98 The Outlook that came with Office 97 was really clunky.
I downloaded a 3-pane extension and a number of other updates. It
still didn't seem as nice as Outlook Express for handling E-mail.
Figuring I had nothing to loose, because I didn't like Outlook 97
anyway, I downloaded Microsoft's Beta 2 of Outlook 98. Now here
is an E-mail program that's almost as good as Outlook Express.
I've worked hard to get my Contacts folder to be my one single
overall address book. That was the whole purpose in using Outlook
instead of Outlook Express.
7/31/98 I've continued to stick with Outlook 98 as my E-mail
client, but I still use ECCO for its wonderful free form outline
note taking features. Additionally, Outlook does lock up with
some frequency when I'm exiting the program. I'm sure I have much
more saved E-mail than the designers of the program ever
anticipated anyone having. With about 100 folders and subfolders,
I'm able to organize and store much information that I gain from
the various E-mail discussion groups. For months I was afraid of
the auto-archive function and delayed letting it run itself. Now
I've finally let it run a couple times and I can still see all my
oldest messages, so I'm not really sure just what's happening
with this archive feature.
1/15/00
Actually my whole Outlook program locked up so terribly on the home computer
that I can't even start it anymore. I think the Office 97 CD that I have has
some sort of error. Therefore I'm back to using Outlook Express for my E-mail
and have long given up on using Outlook as my PIM and gone back to Ecco for
managing my information.
A Whole New Approach
1/16/00 I've still been using Ecco Pro as my main PIM on the
home computer, though it is now a defunct orphan program. It's
not that I so much like its calendar or address book, it's the
outliner style of storing lots of data that appeals to me.
Because my Ecco is on a CD and my work computer doesn't have a CD
drive, I've been having to use Outlook at work. There really is
enough separation of my work and real lives that having two
separate programs hasn't been too problematic. Because my
computer system at work doesn't provide a good way for me to
manage information, I have been using a paper system for the past
year. I've given up on the VA ever providing me with a decent
computer system, though they have been saying it could be coming
for more than 6 months now.
I got very interested in this new Visor Deluxe, an 8 meg PDA
from Handspring, a company created when the original founders of
the Palm Pilot felt too constrained by the 3Com corporation. Only
$250 for an 8 MB, palm OS, PDA sounded too good to be true. When
I started reading the reviews and feedback from people, I found
there were some quality problems, huge shipping and availability
problems, and the worst Customer Support since AOL invented
horrible Customer Support. In my researching about the Visor, I
was really impressed by much seemingly useful software is
available for the Palm OS. I had looked at a Windows CE operating
system on a small device a few years ago and thought it would be
great. Since then it has proven itself a typical Windows product
by becoming extremely bloated and a resource hog. Not only that,
but there is very little software available for it. On the other
hand, Palm has now sold 5 million PDA's and there something like
20,000 developers producing all sorts of neat programs and
utilities for it. I spent a lot time yesterday searching the web
on information about the Palm products and the software available
for the Palm OS. There is now a Palm VII that includes a wireless
connection, but I believe one has to pay monthly for another
service and the device still isn't all that useful yet. That
leaves my choices between the IIIx and the Vx. The "x"
models are the ones that have more memory than their
counterparts, with the IIIx having 4 MB and the Vx having 8 MB.
Unlike the "GameBoy" look of the Visor, the Palm Vx has
an aluminum case. Not quite as cool as Toshiba's magnesium cased
subnotebook, but not too shabby.
One of my main concerns is data input. Each day I get detailed
reports on each of my patients, and I jot notes down during this
time that tell what I want to do for them that day. This provides
a daily ToDo list, as well as leaving a documentation of the work
I've done. In medicine, if you don't document, it didn't happen.
The problem is that the computer system is so slow at work that I
can't possibly document in the electronic patient record all that
I would like to. Therefore it is important for me to have
documentation of what I've done somewhere. I'm not sure that the
Graffiti input system will be fast enough for me to get down what
I'd want during the morning report time, though I realized there
is a definite learning curve for that. Since college, I've done
my note taking in printing rather than script, so I hope I won't
have too much trouble with the Graffitti system. One of the
medical software programs I found appears to have customizable
pop-up lists for lots of the most common entries. This could mean
that input would just consist of stylus taps, rather than
writing. Landmark or some such company also makes a small
keyboard called GoType! that might also be useful. I really think
I'll give a Palm product a try and report back on how it works
for me.
3/17/00 It's exactly two months now since I bought
the Palm Vx. Last night I bought and added Quicksheet 4.0
which now gives me a spreadsheet that integrates totally with
Excel. Earlier this week I downloaded the software from
AvantGo and began setting up a number of channels. Now at
each Hot Synch I get the latest weather, medical news, Hand held
computer news and developments and much more. All this is
downloaded right to the Palm for viewing any time. No more
needing access to the desk top system to catch up on very up to
date news.
12/7/00 I've experimented with many of the Outliner programs
available for the Palm. So far, I'm most impressed with Progect,
and I recently discovered another called Shadow. I've been
putting a lot of information into Arranger for the past 10
months, but I may very well change to one of the above programs.
UltraRecall Pro v2.0b
Was excited enough to buy a
license for this baby, even after a bit of a mess getting a copy installed and
registered. The selling point of this program for was the ability to place
and exact "copy" at another place in the outline. In fact, it's not a copy
at all. It is a second instance of the original node. This way and
important subtopic, such as "The House" can be given a top level position as
well as living at the proper place in the Overall Outline. Any changes to
one are made on the other. Another great feature, which I find more useful
for research than general record keeping or ToDo list generation, is the ability
to copy or link a web page anywhere in the outline. A menu is added to
Internet Explorer to Copy or Link. I prefer to copy most pages, or at
least a selection of one, as that leaves the material available at times of no
internet connection. The storage alogorythym must be fairly sophisticated
as pages are stored very accurately, and take up minimal room. I have no
idea how many pages and parts of pages I've added to my UltraRecall, but the
file had not grown large. Size is about 55,000 KB
Despite skulking around the forums and reading the local
and on line help, searching is not at all intuitive for me, and I'm sad to say
that I still do not know how to produce a simple list of current ToDo:s
Website Work
PIM Project
Nokia N800
Asus eeePC
Adventures in Linux
created 2/7/08
updated 2/7/08