The 'PI' eater? -- A look at Agendus for Windows Mobile v1.01 [Archive]

Don Tolson

04-11-2007, 04:00 PM

<img src="http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-logo.jpg" /> Product Category: Software – PIM Manufacturer: <A HREF = "http://www.iambic.com/agenduspro/wmppc/" target = "blank"> Iambic</A> Where to Buy: <A HREF = "http://www.mobihand.com/pocketpcthoughts/product.asp?id=9688" target = "blank"> MobiHand (affiliate link)</A> Price: $24.95USD for the Professional Edition. $19.95USD for the Standard Edition. A fully functioning 10-day trial is available. System Requirements: Windows Mobile 5 or above (PPC, PPC Phone Edition, or Smartphone). Specifications: Application requires 2.5MB of memory. Can be installed to main memory or storage card. Pros: <li>Well featured for a first release;<li>Small memory footprint;<li>Quick navigation between screens. Cons: <li>Preferences selection held in a single, large menu;<li>Sometimes difficult to find features due to screen organization, or only available from tap&hold menus;<li>No native email support. Summary: In a world dominated by Pocket Informant and Agenda Fusion, Iambic has boldly proclaimed their entry into the Pocket PC Personal Information Management arena with Agendus. Based on the award-winning Palm OS version, Agendus claims to provide a full-featured PIM, “...optimized to handle the dynamics of your everyday life, and provide a level of proactive personal assistance that so far has only been available from a 'real life' assistant...” That's a pretty tall order, and Iambic has made a good attempt with their first release. But Agendus definitely shows its Palm roots and lack of Windows Mobile sophistication when compared to more mature offerings like Pocket Informant and Agenda Fusion. Read on for the full review!<!> <PAGEBREAK> Introduction From what I understand on the forums, Agendus and its predecessor, ActionNames, have been part of the Palm OS world for quite a while. So, bringing a product with this heritage to the Windows Mobile platform brings up interesting questions. “How much of its Palm-centered functionality can it retain?” and “Can it compete with mature PIM applications which have grown up natively on the PPC/WM platform?” Well, let's take a look... Two versions of Agendus are available. The Standard Edition provides all the capabilities we have come to expect from a PIM, but spends more time and effort in the Contacts management area (more on this later). For a little bit more money, you can acquire the Professional Edition which provides Over-The-Air update capability plus better management of appointment attendees and call roll-overs. The Professional Edition also supports font-effects (underline, strike-through, etc.) for calls, tasks, and appointments. To be honest, I wasn't sure exactly what 'Over-The-Air' updates meant, but I think it refers to the ability of Agendus to make use of available Internet connections to gather updates for weather, quotes, etc. to the Agenda view and obtaining maps for contact addresses. Although I won't be able to go through all the features of Agendus or compare them to PI and AF in this review, I hope to give you a good idea of the basic flow of the application and its overall capabilities. Installation Installation of Agendus is simple and straightforward, using the typical Activesync-engaging executable on the PC. I didn't see an option for a downloadable .CAB file on the Iambic web site. Like other PIMs, Agendus uses the same database as Outlook, so navigation from screen to screen is fairly brisk. When first starting up, there is a very short (1 to 2 second) initialization routine. The default when you first start Agendus is the Agenda view, which looks considerably different from the version in Outlook, but not so much from what we have come to expect from third party PIMS. Included in the view are appointments for the current (and next days), tasks (current and future) and other general information such as Quotes, Historic Facts and Local Weather. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-main.gif" border="1"> Figure 1: First starting up Agendus. Along the bottom of the screen is the tray of icons which act as 'fast keys' to the various parts of the application. Iambic has done a good job of selecting intuitive icons so it's relatively easy guess where each of these goes. From left to right, they are Agenda View, Daily View, Weekly View, and Monthly View. Each of these can be customized to a couple of options, but we'll go into that in more detail later. Then comes Contacts (silhouette), Tasks (checkmark), and Email (envelope). On the Day, Week and Month views, an additional icon with an arrow pointing to the calendar brings up a date selector for moving to a particular date. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-dateselect.gif" border="1"> Figure 2: Date Selector. Note there are a number of ways provided to move around the calendar. The apostrophes show which days have activities on them. Unfortunately, just tapping on the desired day doesn't take you to the Day view. You have to tap the Done button on the bottom of the screen. The Magnifying Glass is, of course, the Search routine, and the Screwdriver brings up what would be known as the Preferences screen in other applications. <PAGEBREAK> Contacts Clearly, the Contacts area is where Agendus has focused most of its attention – attempting to provide a more complete Contact/Relationship Management experience than is available with other products. Contacts can be grouped, or not, based on a preferences setting or by a selection from the Contacts screen. If not grouped, the display is similar to that seen in Pocket Outlook with tabs along the top to select the first letter of the 'filed' name. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-contactsnogroup.gif" border="1"> Figure 3: Display of ungrouped Contacts. Multiple tapping of the tab doesn't move the list to the next letter as we are used to in Outlook (e.g. Double-tapping the 'def' tab doesn't take you from starting at 'd' to starting at 'e'). You need to scroll through the list to get to the desired entry. Entries can be grouped by name, company, city, state, country and zip code – depending upon the selection from the drop-down list in the top left. Grouping by company for instance, shows the number of entries within each company, plus the typical side arrow/down arrow icon to display the next level of hierarchy (i.e. Everyone in a given company) <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-groupbyco.gif" border="1"> Figure 4: Contacts grouped by company. You can also display contacts by Categories, if you have assigned them to each other, by selecting the desired category from the drop-down list at the top right. This brings up another oddity in the interface. When a drop-down list is displayed in Agendus, there doesn't appear to be any way to dismiss the list without making a selection (fortunately, most come with a 'no-selection' option) and all of the lists use a checkmark to identify the current selected option, implying that there is a capability to multi-select options in the list to combine categories, companies, etc. However, this is not the case. Only one option is allowed from the drop-down list at a time. Tapping on an entry's name displays the Contact edit screen. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-editcontact.gif" border="1"> Figure 5: Editing a Contact's info. The Unfiled button at the bottom lets you know that this contact has not been associated with a Category. :roll: Again, things are a bit different from what we are used to seeing, since portions of the data associated with a contact are separated by menu items across the top, rather than tabs along the bottom. <PAGEBREAK> <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-contactaddress.gif" border="1"> Figure 6: The address portion of the contact info. I do like the way they've used the same input interface, but separated each of the address types. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-contactdates.gif" border="1"> Figure 7: Assigning dates to the Contact. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-contacttel.gif" border="1"> Figure 8: Editing the phone numbers associated with a Contact. If you tap on a the telephone icon to the right (at least on a PPC-phone edition) Agendus offers to dial the number. The same thing will happen if you tap a phone number in the Contacts listing. Tapping and holding a contact name presents a menu of options for the contact. In fact, this seems to be a general modus operandi for the application, and in some cases the number of options available on the menu can get quite extensive – taking up the entire vertical landscape. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-contaxtmenu.gif" border="1"> Figure 9: The menu which appears when you tap & hold a contact. One option from the Contact tap&hold menu is the Contact History, which shows all contacts with that person via appointments, phone calls, etc. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-contacthistory.gif" border="1"> Figure 10: Contact History screen. Unfortunately, I couldn't get this to work for me. I'm not really sure how this is updated, since it didn't seem to be changed by existing Call History (in the phone) or appointments. Perhaps it comes from contacts, etc. made within Agendus? Unfortunately, some of the features (such as Contact History) are only available from the tap & hold menus. <PAGEBREAK> Appointments As with other tools, Agendus provides the normal Agenda, Daily, Weekly and Monthly views. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-agenda.gif" border="1"> Figure 11: Agenda view. The Agenda (or Today) view can be configured to show one or many days in the future. It also includes a Quote of the Day, this Day in History event, and Weather Forecast which are downloaded from the Internet, if a connection is available. I had a a couple of problems with the Agenda view though. One was with the Tasks displayed, since it's not able to show all Active tasks including both the dated and undated tasks. Anniversaries associated with Contacts also showed up which had long since past. I'm not sure why, but I had to delete them from the Contact information to make them disappear. There is also limited linkage from the Today screen to other areas. For example, tapping the Tasks icon does not take you to the Tasks display and tapping on the day name on the Agenda view doesn't take you to the Day view. Tapping on an appointment line in Agenda view does take you to the edit screen for appointments and it is possible to navigate from Month view to Day view by tapping on the appropriate day. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-day.gif" border="1"> Figure 12: Day view. Two versions of the Week view are available – the Week list, in which a week's worth of appointments are presented in a list, separated by day. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-week.gif" border="1"> Figure 13: Week List View. The second is a Week Block view, where the week is shown in a 'week at a time' view, with meeting times blocked off. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-weekblock.gif" border="1"> Figure 14: Week Block View. <PAGEBREAK> There are also two ways of viewing each month. The Month List view presents a typical calendar representation of the Month, with the time and first couple of characters of each entry shown in the appropriate day. Unfortunately, this becomes so filled as to be almost unusable if you are even moderately busy. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-monthlist.gif" border="1"> Figure 15: Month List View. The Month Icon view again uses a calendar display for the days of the month, but instead, shows a clock with the various portions of non-available time filled in on two morning and afternoon clock faces. Personally, I found the clock version of the Month view hard to use, since the clocks were so small. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-monthclock.gif" border="1"> Figure 16: Month Clock View. There is also a Month icon view, in which the calendar is filled with icons you have added to your various meetings, appointments and events, etc. This could be helpful to keep track of important anniversaries, birthdays, and special events, but I think it would be a lot of work to attach them. As with the Contacts area, tapping and holding on an entry or blank space in any one of the calendar views presents a menu to add a new appointment, new task or new call. You can also create a new entry by selecting 'New' from the Menu (right) softkey options list. The screens for new appointments/meetings use a similar interface to that presented for new tasks. A series of buttons along the top of the screen take you to the various parts of the appointment entry. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-newappt.gif" border="1"> Figure 17: Creating a new appointment/meeting. For me, this set of screens wasn't as well laid out as the Contacts entry. Things were located in places I wouldn't have expected them, and naming conventions were a bit odd. For instance... to set the time and date of the meeting, you need to tap the 'Today' button at the top of the screen. The Unfiled dropdown in the lower right refers to adding a Category to the meeting. Meeting location is on the double-checkmark screen. I'm not really sure what 'Roll-over' refers to, but it appears from the screen that it is for meetings that span multiple days. And there seems to be an option to create a 'no time' meeting? These show up as events displayed before the regular start time and come across to desktop Outlook at all-day events. <PAGEBREAK> Tasks I found this area of Agendus confusing since, as I mentioned, it wasn't possible to show the same 'active' task list including both the undated and dated tasks that I get from Pocket Outlook. There are lots of options for showing tasks due in the future or past, but no way to combine them. Adding a new task entry uses the same top menu tabs/selections interface as found in the Contacts, to go to the various parts of the Task. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-newtask.gif" border="1"> Figure 18: Adding a new Task. Agendus provides an interesting way of assigning importance/urgency attributes to a task. I wasn't familiar with the four-corner box, but it's an interesting concept. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-taskprio.gif" border="1"> Figure 19: Setting the Importance/Urgency of a Task. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-taskrepeat.gif" border="1"> Figure 20: Although there was some concern mentioned in the forums about a lack of repeatability/recurrence features for tasks and meetings, they worked fine for me. Calls Calls are basically reminders to phone someone (preferably in your Contacts list). They look very similar to inputting a new Task and in fact, are stored and processed the same way as a dated Task. They are even transferable to the desktop version of Outlook – coming across as Tasks. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-newcall.gif" border="1"> Figure 21: Add a new Call screen. <PAGEBREAK> Email The email functions within Agendus provide fairly simple, straightforward support of emails from Outlook. In fact, the email icon on Agendus' tray simply connects to Pocket Outlook's email function. I won't bother repeating those here. Preferences Setting individual preferences for Agendus is accessed via the tools icon in the lower right of the screen or from the Menu (right) softkey. At first blush, the screens displayed here are deceptively simplistic, since it only shows the settings for the current view (Contacts, Appts, Email, etc.) <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-taskprefs.gif" border="1"> Figure 22: Tasks Preferences. And this is another one of the places where Agendus has taken the most significant shift away from the normal Windows Mobile interface. The others preferences screens are only available from a sizable menu list on the Menu (right) soft key which takes up most of the screen. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-onlinesetting.gif" border="1"> Figure 23: Today Screen Services preferences. Other Tools Back on the view screens, an Icon Manager function is also available. With it, you can change the icons associated with various contact #'s, appointment types, etc. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-iconmgmt.gif" border="1"> Figure 24: Icon Manager. The search capability is fairly powerful, being able to scan for specific types of items like contacts, appointments,tasks, calls, etc. using the keywords provided. The response time to queries was very speedy (typically less than a couple of seconds), even with my two years of appointments and old tasks. <img src = "http://www.pocketpcthoughts.com/images/web/2003/don-mar07-agendus-search.gif" border="1"> Figure 25: Search screen. <PAGEBREAK> Documentation The user manual for Agendus for Windows Mobile has just been made available, but wasn't ready in time for the review. In a couple of areas though, I suspect you'll need it to explain what's happening. Conclusions Is this a PI or AF killer? Not yet. It's got a fair way to go to match the power and capabilities of these much more mature products. It is a worthy first release, however, and shows some promising new approaches. As far as programming style goes, Iambic has attempted to keep more of the Palm look and feel in the product by ignoring some of the standard Windows Mobile style sheets. This is not necessarily a bad thing, since some of the best innovations in ergonomics come when you throw out the rule book (e.g. Apple). However when you do this, you have to come up with something that is just as or more intuitive that what was there before. Agendus isn't quite there yet. With all the preferences in long menu lists and some options only available from tap & hold menus, Agendus is not optimized for one-handed operation, especially on a Phone Edition Pocket PC. It will be interesting to see where Iambic takes this product over the next few releases. Don is an Associate Director with Fujitsu Consulting and a member of its Enterprise Mobility Community. He has been an avid 'alternative' PIM user since his early SHARP Wizard days, but still not found one thats 'just right'...

JamesM

04-11-2007, 05:29 PM

Nice review Don. It's my hunch that Iambic is going after the growing crowd of people who have used Agendus for years on their Treos or other Palm devices, who have now switched to WM (Treos). In other words, they may not care right now about taking on AF or PI, since they can recoup their dev costs from this group. The Palm version has equally long menu selections (unintuitive to most Pocket outlook, AF or PI users) that may be intuitive to the Palm folks. It would be interesting to see what longtime users of the Palm OS version think of the WM version.

Thanks again,
James

griph

04-12-2007, 01:24 AM

I believe that the aesthetics and clarity of the Agendus display needs some work too - appearance is very important to me. One of the reasons why I already prefer PI7 to Agenda Fusion. I appreciate that this is a subjective point - but my opinion anyway.

Ian Breakspear

04-12-2007, 02:41 AM

As a long standing ActionNames/Agendus user on PalmOS, I can't think of a major program I'd want to install LESS than Agendus.

The Palm version for the last few years was buggy beyond belief, minor bug fixes were commonly released for free but major bugs weren't fixed till the new version (which you had to pay for). Then another set of bugs would be introduced.

I used to love ActionNames (its original name) for PalmOS in the beginning as it was stable, fast, and very useful. But it became more unstable, bloated, and difficult to use as time went on so I deleted it from my Treo650.

Additionally Iambic has the worst customer service of any PDA software company I have ever dealt with. They have a history of what is, in my opinion, rather unethical marketing practices (see the Icons with Bert and the DateBk sagas). Take a look in their own forums for a glimpse of dissatisfaction. My personal dealings with them have been frustrating as they just don't care.

Now I'm on WM5 and have found AgendaOne I love it. Does everything I want, fast, stable, easy to use, looks good.

Just my 2 cents.

JMac

04-24-2007, 11:14 PM

Though an original beta tester for Agendus for Windows Mobile, and an owner of a Pro license for it, I am still using Pocket Informant 2007 on my own devices.

There are still several issues that prevent me from using Agendus as my PIM. You cannot assign Agendus as the default PIM. You must open it manually whenever you want to use it.

On most devices the default PIM hardware buttons will still open Pocket Outlook instead of Agendus.

You cannot use any of the Pocket PC icons that you presently use with most other PPC applications. You must purchase separate icon sets from iambic. They are in the usual Agendus icon format - all in the set are part of a database and you have to load the entire database to use any.

Since I already owned all of the Agendus iconsets available, I installed them and tried to use them. But as soon as I did, Agendus immediately uses up all available memory and the device becomes non-responsive. Turns out that Agendus attempts to load the entire icon database (the Platinum Iconset consists of more than 15,000 icons!), thus eating up every last bit of the PPC's memory. So my additional icons purchased from iambic are completely non-usable. This bug was reported by me very early in the beta, but has yet to be resolved. Actually, it still has yet to be addressed at all. Their development team claims that they have other, more important issues on the list ahead of that.

Another icon problem - when you assign an icon to a category, it is only assigned to any new events that you create within Agendus. This means that my existing 600 contacts do not have any icons assigned, not to mention all of my existing tasks and appointments. They have been aware of this since early in the beta also, and it is also staying low on the priority list, even though it makes my preferred month view by icon worthless for now.

A moderator on their forum recommended that I delete all of my existing contacts and events on my desktop PC, and then restore them to try and "trick" Agendus into assigning icons to these. Needless to day, I don't feel that this is a reasonable recommendation at all, and should never be made by anyone representing the developer. And, no - I did not try it.

Agendus does not pick up any of the photos that you have assigned to contacts in Outlook - either on your device or on your desktop. You must separately assign them within Agendus.

Once you go ahead and assign photos to your contacts within Agendus, there is no photo-view for contacts! The only time you can see the photo is if you open that particular contact. And that was just added recently. Just a few weeks ago, I could only see the contact photos if I was in the edit mode for a contact.

Initially, online services like weather and "Quote of the Day" would not update automatically. Instead you had to first establish a connection and then manually tell it to update. But, you say, my device is a PPC Phone and therefore is always connected! Yep. But they didn't think of that. On my Cingular 8125 I always had to manually "start" the connection - even though it already was connected. What I was really oing was tricking Agendus into "thinking" that I was just starting the connection so that it would update the weather on the Today View.
Some of the above may have fixes out - I haven't checked yet this week or last. And when I mention that the Manual Connection Requirement was a problem, that's because I see that they claim to have fixed that now, though I saw quite a few users posting that it was still not working for them yet.

All in all, I had much higher expectations for this program. Having used Agendus for Palm and loved it, I figured that the Windows Mobile and its broader media robustness would make Agendus for WM a true killer app. However they decided, in my opinion, to release it as what most PPC developers would never consider a release-ready condition. This is not even as polished as an early, rough PI private beta. But iambic had already started selling full licenses for this application early in the beta program - which is not a normal situation at all. Apparently they will only commit a relatively small amount of funding to get Windows Mobile programs started, and then the design team is expected to get something ready that will at least generate revenue - even of it is not-quite-ready-for-primetime yet.

And in my opinion, this PIM is not.

Sooner Magic

05-11-2007, 04:21 PM

I have not purchased Agendus, but I do own Trip Tracker. Trip Tracker was a Two Peaks product and iambic bought them out.

It appears that their customer support is seriously lacking as evidenced by this thread. http://support.iambic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=27807

In essence, numerous people were initially promised a WM 5 version of Trip Tracker, yet it has not been released. In fact, the moderators are not even responding to requests for information.

If (according to their website) they are trying to be the “home of innovative software solutions” and “help you manage your personal and business activities a lot more easily”, they have a lot of work to do.

I share this in the hopes that they will either release info on the WM5 version of Trip Tracker or at least let us know that it is no longer supported so we can move to a different product.

If they don’t want to support it, I bet SBSH among others will be glad to fill the void with a comparable product supported by quality customer service.

dsilver

05-12-2007, 04:37 AM

As a longtime Palm user of Agendus, I too had high expectations for the PPC version. We're up to ver. 1.04 now, and things are getting a bit better. You can (FINALLY) install it as the default PIM. Several other things are shaping up as well. Yes, it does have a way to go, but if it matures to the degree its Palm counterpart had (not trying to start an argument), it should be a good piece of work. I figure for a $13 price, there isn't much to lose. I've always had excellent customer support for the 7 years I've used their products. I find their development team and forum support to be quite substantial. As with all things in life, YMMV.

jlc, just jlc

07-18-2007, 03:43 AM

Nice review Don. It's my hunch that Iambic is going after the growing crowd of people who have used Agendus for years on their Treos or other Palm devices, who have now switched to WM (Treos). In other words, they may not care right now about taking on AF or PI, since they can recoup their dev costs from this group. The Palm version has equally long menu selections (unintuitive to most Pocket outlook, AF or PI users) that may be intuitive to the Palm folks. It would be interesting to see what longtime users of the Palm OS version think of the WM version.

Thanks again,
James

As a long time Palm and Agendus user, I am underwhelmed by the WM version. Much of the selections (switching views, etc) can be done one handed on the Palm; the options screens are much better laid out on the Palm; the WM version just doesn't feel right. It reminds me of the old ports of Mac software to Wndows - they just didn't look or feel right.

emuelle1

07-18-2007, 12:15 PM

I've been happy with Pocket Informant for more than two years. Development is continuous and Alex is fast to put in bug fixes.