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PERSONAL INFORMATION MISMANAGEMENT | PAGE 1, 2
The classic free-form PIM is Lotus Agenda, a DOS-based program first issued in 1988. Agenda let you build, organize and connect big heaps of information by entering items according to category, date and priority and then sorting them dynamically, as needed, into different groupings. Though it's long since been abandoned by Lotus, there are still devotees who use it and swear by it (Jimmy Guterman's four-part opus on Agenda in the Chicago Tribune is a good introduction). Around the same time Agenda emerged, an inventive little program called Tornado came along and allowed users to jot down notes in individual windows, build vast piles of notes and then retrieve them from the trove -- singly or in related groups -- with a speedy "find" command. In the Windows era, Tornado evolved into a more elaborate and structured product called Info Select that provides calendar and address-book functions within the old note-pile design. Ecco is the PIM program I fell in love with back in 1994, and I'm still using it today to organize the notes for this article. Ecco is an outliner on steroids: It keeps your calendar, addresses and to-dos just like all the other PIMs, but it does so in outline form -- you can annotate down to any level of depth you want, then "collapse" the outline into more compact form as needed. More important, Ecco lets you design your own outlines, as simple or complex as you need, with spreadsheet-like "columns" of additional data. Ecco is a smartly designed program that works fast and saves tons of data in trim files. You can put your entire life into it; I have. Which is why I, like legions of other fans, was distraught to learn last fall that NetManage, its owner, was discontinuing it. There seem to be a number of explanations for Ecco's demise: Now that Microsoft is giving away a "lite" version of its Outlook program for free, a lot of software companies are backing away from the PIM market as fast as they can. Ecco enthusiasts also point the finger at what they see as mismanagement and missed opportunities on NetManage's part. The real problem here may lie in the software industry's obsession with "creating standards." Each PIM producer may dream that it might someday achieve Microsoft-like dominance of its niche (as Microsoft itself plainly does), but by their nature PIMS tend toward a fragmented market: Some people like outliners, others like databases; some like structure, some like free-form approaches. So "creating a standard" is nearly impossible; a program like Ecco may develop a loyal and significant following, but it's unlikely to appeal to everyone. And in today's software business, companies run away from markets that don't offer at least the hope of some kind of standard-setting monopoly. (Limited as the PIM options are for Windows users, they're practically nonexistent for Mac users.) In an ideal world, there'd be a whole spectrum of unique PIM programs -- one for every user, even. But we'll never get anything like that from the conventional software business. Perhaps the free software/open source model -- once it begins to reach out from the hardcore hacker enthusiasts to more general users -- will begin to fill this vacuum; since it's built around individual programmers' contributing useful modifications and tweaks, it might turn into a wellspring of new ideas and tools for organizing our data and lives. In the meantime, Ecco still works, but sooner or later it will yellow around the edges, and I'm still hunting for the perfect PIM to replace it. I've looked at Zoot, which lets you build "libraries" of associated information, Web addresses and notes; and I've checked out Enfish Tracker, which builds a searchable index of your e-mail and files and "tracks" categories you choose. They're interesting, and I'll probably keep using them. But they just don't work the way I do. If you've found the perfect program that works the way you do, e-mail Scott Rosenberg. |
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