
AgentDAÑa handy time management tool

By Brian C. Keith

If the White Rabbit in AliceÕs Adventures in Wonderland had used AgentDA 2.1 and a PowerBook, he would have always been on time.

AgentDA 2.1, from Team Building Technologies, Inc., is a very accessible and easy-to-use electronic scheduler and time manager desk accessory for any Macintosh. You can use AgentDA 2.1 to track appointments, prepare to-do lists, schedule meetings and workgroups, and plan and track personal and group activities.

AgentDA 2.1 is plain, straight forward, and very flexible. You can effortlessly show any number of days or weeks, set up reminder alarms to go off before an activity occurs (and pop on a snooze button when you want to procrastinate), and even search your calendar for activities.

Featured featsÉ

If youÕre the kind of person who thinks day timers turn us into slaves of time, AgentDA offers the List Display. (See Figure 1.) YouÕll find the List Display handy if you like to block out chunks of things to do rather than break down and fit activities into 24-hour time slots.

On the List Display, AgentDA offers you a few ways to show the amount of time an activity takes. For example, you can show the start time at the top and finish time at the bottom of each activity, or you can show the entire range of time each activity requires at the top. You can even indicate the length of time each activity takes on a little clock icon that shows the length of time blacked out.

Figure 1 here


If youÕre the kind of person who thinks to-do lists are a crutch for those who really want to organize their lives with day timers, AgentDA offers the Grid Display. (See Figure 2.) YouÕll like the Grid Display if you need to view your activities by the hour, by the half hour, or even by the quarter hour. Of the two displays, the Grid Display looks more like an appointment diary, so if you presently use one, youÕll likely find the Grid Display familiar and more to your taste.

Figure 2 here


AgentDA also provides a helpful tool bar along the right edge of both displays. Buttons on the tool bar enable you to toggle between displays, skip to any day on your calendar, and select the number of days and weeks you want to show at one time (from one to seven days, and from one to five weeks).
To toggle to the List Display, for example, all you do is click on the button with the vertical lines located at the top of the tool bar. (See Figures 1 and 2.) To toggle to the Grid Display, all you do is click on the button with the horizontal lines thatÕs located just below the List Display button.

You can also use the Today Button just below the Grid Display button to instantaneously go to and show the current day from wherever you are in your calendar. When you click on the Today Button, the current day box is displayed and its contours blink three times, helping you to quickly zero in on TODAY.

Another similar button on the tool barÑthe Calendar ButtonÑenables you to go to and display any other day on your calendar.

You can also use the vertical and horizontal number bars on the tool bar to select the number of days and the number of weeks, respectively, you want to show at one time on a display. To show, for example, schedules for Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday for the next two weeks, you click on 3 on the vertical, and 2 on the horizontal number bar.

The answer to why you would ever want to show fewer than five days per week on a display may seem obscure at first. But if you work part-time or at some point need to see quickly what your Mondays look like for the rest of the month, the day number bar makes sense.

Make a dateÉ

To enter an activity, double-click on any empty block in a day box on the List or Grid Display. When the Description Activity dialog pops open, you can type a description of your activity (up to 255 characters long), set the start time and duration of your activity, set an alarm to remind you about an activity if you want, and specify the format and layout of your activity description when itÕs displayed in each day box. (See Figure 3.)

Figure 3 here


The first time I used the Description Activity dialog, I discovered a bewildering and, in my opinion, annoying limitation in AgentDA: You cannot enter 12:00 AM as a finish time for an activity, since technically speaking, 12:00 AM marks the beginning of a new day.

When I first attempted to specify 16 hours as the duration time of an activity that started at 8:00 AM (and thus finished at 12 midnight), AgentDA barked and abruptly reset my start time to 7:59 AM and my finish time to 11:59 PM. After tinkering with the duration time for a while, I realized the problem. IÕve always considered 12 midnight to be 12 midnight, not 12:00 AMÑthe start of a new day.

When you enter invalid start and duration times, AgentDA should display an information dialog that tells you that you canÕt specify 12 midnight as a finish time, instead of barking and abruptly ÒcorrectingÓ your values for you. Better yet, AgentDA should allow you to enter a duration time that extends over more than a single 24-hour period. Rome, after all, wasnÕt built in a day.

You can also use the Description Activity dialog to set up regularly scheduled activities. In AgentDA, you schedule activities that occur regularly by duplicating them. For example, suppose you want to schedule your Mac user group monthly meeting (mine, MacValley, meets on the first Wednesday of each month) on your calendar for the next year, starting on Wednesday, JuneÊ2, 1993. First, you open the Description Activity dialog for a block of time between 7:30 and 10:00 pm on Wednesday, 2 June 1993, and fill in the information about the MacValley Users Group meeting.

When you click on the Duplicate check box, and the Duplicate dialog pops up, you specify the number of times the activity is to occur, in this case 12 times, and the frequency of the activity, in this case every month. (See Figure 4.) As a result, the MacValley Users Group meeting is automatically slotted in from 7:30 PM to 10:00 PM every first Wednesday of the month from June 1993 through June 1994.

Figure 4 here


The trouble with Team Building TechnologiesÕ implementation of this feature, however, is that once theyÕre created, duplicated activities are not linked together. So, suppose that after entering your duplicated activities you decide to change the duration of the MacValley Users Group Meeting from 2 and a half to 3 hours. You canÕt just open a duplicated activity, change it, and thus change all related recurring activities. You must find each activity and update each one individually.

On the other hand, itÕs nice to be able to edit, copy, and move duplicated activities individually. A cross-reference, hypertext link, or internal Publish and Subscribe feature, that you could select optionally when you duplicated activities, would be a welcome feature.

Quick change artistry

To move an activity, all you do is click and drag it to a new time or day. The time of the activity is retained depending on where you move it. You copy activities just as you move them, only you hold down the option key when you click and drag. To move and copy activities from one open calendar to another (yes, you can open more than one at a time), use the standard Macintosh Cut, Copy, and Paste editing commands. To delete an activity, all you do is highlight it and press the delete key.

Checking off activities on your calendar is as easy as moving and copying them. All you do is highlight the activity and select Done on the AgentDA menu. A small check mark appears to the left of the activity. (You can also check off activities on the Description Activity dialog, but thatÕs a much less convenient method.)

AgentDAÕs trio of find commands is probably its best and most handy set of features. AgentDA provides a Find To DoÕs command, that enables you to find and highlight activities that are not checked off. AgentDA also provides a Find and Find Again command, which lets you find activities based on a text string you provide. You can specify the period of time between which you want to search, and you can search for activities serially or all at once.

AgentDA also offers a full range of customizing commands. You can specify the format of dates (the European day-month-year format as well as the American month-day-year format, for example), and you can set the typeface, size, and style of titles and activity descriptions in your calendar. 

You can also specify settings to be used on your calendar by default, such as the number of lines shown, whether or not text in day boxes is wrapped to the next line, and whether or not the time is displayed in day boxes. You can also choose the alarm sound you want to use by default, and you can set a default for how soon before an activity AgentDA is to issue an alarm.

While customizing commands are copious in AgentDA, printing features on the other hand, are limited. AgentDA provides only two ways to print your calendar. You can either print the part of your calendar as shown in your List or Grid Display, or you can print each day in your List or Grid Display on a separate sheet. When you use the latter method to print your calendar, activities for each day are printed in a column on the left of each sheet, and a box for notes is printed on the right.

Regardless of the method you use, the part of your calendar thatÕs printed is defined by the number of days and weeks you select on the day and week number bars, up to a maximum of 35 days.

You can also specify header and footer text to be printed at the top and bottom of printed sheets. Unfortunately, to use this feature you must enter special characters (an ampersand and a code letter) to define and format the header and footer textÑa user-hostile, DOS-like, implementation that many Macintosh users may find perturbing.

ThatÕs not the only annoying printing problem. When I attempted to print five days in one week on separate sheets, the result wasnÕt exactly what I intended. The AgentDA Reference Manual implies that if you specify this method of printing and select Pages-All on the Print dialog, all pages displayed in the List Display (within the range you specify on the vertical and horizontal number bars) are printed.

However, when I selected this method and selected Pages-All on the Print dialog, only the first day shown in the List Display printed. To get all pages in the List Display to print, I had to specify the range of days to print. Either IÕm missing something, the manual is incorrect, or thereÕs a bug in the Print command.

In any event, after you set up activities on your calendar, all you need to do then is wait for them to happen. When a reminder alarm you set goes off, AgentDA displays an alarm dialog. (See Figure 7). The alarm dialog offers you a few choices. You can click on the ÒsnoozeÓ check box to instruct AgentDA to wait and issue the alarm again after a few minutes; you can completely remove the activity from your calendar; or you can check the activity off and forget about it!

The good book

In spite of offering some possibly misleading information about printing separate sheets, the AgentDA Reference Manual is very useful. It is pleasingly laid out, copiously illustrated, and presents all of AgentDAÕs features and functions logically and thoroughly.

The bottom line

Although itÕs not a sophisticated scheduling utility, AgentDAÕs accessible, easy-to-use, and very flexible set of features make it a helpful tool for any Macintosh owner. Mac Plus, Classic, and PowerBook owners especially, though, will like AgentDA for its low 140K consumption of RAM and its coherent, uncluttered displays.

Requirements
Macintosh Plus,
System 6.0.5 or later,
140 K RAM minimum

The Facts
AgentDA, version 2.1
Team Building Technologies, Inc.
836 Bloomfield Avenue
MontrŽal, QuŽbec, Canada H2V 3S6
Voice 514¥278¥3010
FAX 514¥278¥2874
List price: $99

© 1993 MacValley Voice Burbank CA

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