New PIMs promise perfection but muster mere mediocrity.
Owen W. Linzmayer
Day-Timer Organizer 2.0
Rating: Acceptable (3 of 5 mice)
Full Contact 3.0
Rating: Acceptable (3 of 5 mice)
IF YOU'RE LOOKING for the perfect PIM (personal information manager), don't expect fulfillment from either Day-Timer Organizer or Full Contact. Both of the products boast impressive features but are almost hopelessly hampered by complicated interfaces and sluggish performance.
Day-Timer Organizer 2.0
The offspring of a joint venture between Day-Timer (the paper-organizer folks) and Kensington Microware (of Turbo Mouse fame), Day-Timer Organizer 2.0 supposedly combines the ease of a loose-leaf organizer with the power of a computer in order to manage your schedules, to-do lists, addresses, phone calls, notes, and expenses. Unfortunately, Day-Timer Organizer adheres too closely to its paper roots and doesn't embrace the Mac's legendary ease of use.
The program imports tab- and comma-delimited text files, although the process is slow and difficult, since the topic is barely covered in the documentation and the interface is unforgiving. Instead of importing all the data into a single file, Day-Timer Organizer uses a hodgepodge of 11 separate files for each database.
Day-Timer Organizer goes overboard with windows as well as with files. The various sections of the program -- daily, weekly, and monthly planners; address book; notebook; expenses; timeline; and the like -- all appear in their own windows, so you can view a lot of information simultaneously, but even big monitors quickly become cluttered and it's easy to get lost in the jumble.
At first blush, Day-Timer Organizer looks polished and the features appear to offer most of what users have come to expect in a PIM, but major shortcomings become apparent as soon as you begin using the program on a daily basis. Common tasks are needlessly complicated by the excessive use of dialog boxes. For example, to add a new item, you click on the Add button in the tool bar and then choose the type of item from a dialog box. A pop-up menu would be much easier. Even more annoying, entries such as meetings on calendars can't be edited directly on the pages on which they appear but, rather, only in their corresponding dialog boxes.
Instead of using the power of the computer to help in data entry and display, Day-Timer Organizer forces you to adjust to its way of doing things. You add people to the address book in last-name/first-name order, for example, and it has no data-entry aids such as capitalization, auto-completion, and phone-number formatting.
Display defaults leave as much to be desired as data entry. Regardless of whether you're viewing the notebook, planners, or address book, Day-Timer Organizer shows only one line for each entry. You can see a multiline entry in its entirety, but to do so, you must manually add visible lines by clicking on a button -- although this wastes space by expanding all entries.
Full Contact 3.0
In late 1995, Pitch Software acquired Full Contact from FIT Software and released version 3.0, incorporating new features such as workgroup functionality and support for PowerTalk, with shared calendars that use publish-and-subscribe. Other improvements include a new icon bar, reduced memory requirements, faster record deletion, password protection, a global Find command, and reports and templates for new Apple printers. Billed as "the most advanced contact manager for the Macintosh," Full Contact is designed for businesspeople who want to track their every contact with meticulous care.
Our disappointment with Full Contact began when we imported tab-delimited information from other programs. Due to the cramped, confusing interface, importing is terribly complicated unless you use the supplied templates for many popular PIMs. Importing is also slow, but that's excusable, since you're not likely to do it too often. Less forgivable is Full Contact's sluggish loading time (with 1,500 records stored, it took about a minute to load on a Power Mac 7500/100; on a Mac IIci, it took an unconscionable 11 minutes. On either machine, Day-Timer Organizer loaded the same data in seconds.
Pitch blames the long load times on the fact that Full Contact is a relational-database program with separate windows (called SuperLists) for names, companies, phone numbers, addresses, notes, and activities, all of which can be linked to one another. But that doesn't explain why the program slows to a crawl under the weight of a modest-sized database. Again, this was especially pronounced on a Mac IIci, with a 25-MHz 68030 processor; this despite Full Contact's system-requirements statement, which indicates that it runs on any 68020-or-better Mac OS machine.
Full Contact allows you to store and view data in multiple ways. Paradoxically, however, Full Contact makes it very difficult to view all information pertaining to a single person in one window. The best Full Contact offers is a detailed view that crams as much as possible into a window with a series of tabs at the bottom for viewing links to other data.
In contrast to Day-Timer Organizer, Full Contact has some nice entry and formatting aids: Fields can be autocompleted, words can be capitalized upon entry if your initial entry matches existing data, and the format of phone numbers, dates, and times is standardized. In addition to these aids, Full Contact includes a few features that are add-ons in other PIMs. There's a built-in word processor for facilitating mail-merge operations and a calendar for tracking events and meetings. By integrating all this in one program, Full Contact can associate people with meetings, track letters sent to companies, and so on.
Full Contact would benefit greatly from a completely rewritten user manual (instead of the old 2.0 guide plus the addendum Pitch currently provides) that includes a step-by-step tutorial with sample files. Don't make the mistake of thinking tech support will come to the rescue. We never reached a live body when calling for technical support; instead we were always prompted to leave voice-mail or send e-mail. Pitch promises to return inquiries within one business day, but some calls went unanswered for days. Pitch claims that e-mail response is faster, but it's almost impossible to solve anything but the simplest technical problems via e-mail.
The Bottom Line
Day-Timer Organizer 2.0 offers a lot of functionality at a decent price. But overreliance on the organizer-book metaphor and the requirement that you enter data the way the program wants you to, instead of the other way around, limit its usefulness.
As for Full Contact 3.0, it is powerful and flexible, but the many ways it lets you store and view data are at best a mixed blessing. There are so many places data can be stored that unless you're extremely diligent about manually cross-referencing chunks of information, you may have trouble finding what you need when you need it. What's more, Full Contact's complexity leads to slow performance, especially on older Macs. For most users, a simpler, leaner program will probably suffice.
Day-Timer Organizer 2.05, $59.95 (list). Company: Day-Timer Technologies, San Mateo, CA; 800-225-5005 or 415-572-6260. Reader Service: Circle #410.
Full Contact 3.0, $199; upgrade from Full Contact 2.0 or Field Assistant, $39.95 (list). Company: Pitch Software, Campbell, CA; 800-242-2252 or 408-374-5504. Reader Service: Circle #411.
Day-Timer Organizer's heavy reliance on the loose-leaf-binder metaphor makes entering and viewing your data much more difficult than need be.
Full Contact is a relational-database program disguised as a PIM, and the result is a slow program with a cluttered, confusing interface.
