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A L S O__T O D A Y
T A B L E__T A L K What's the dream operating system for cruising the Internet? It's another Mac vs. Windows go-round in the 21st area of Table Talk
____________________ Technology news from
R E C E N T L Y Coming soon to computer games -- advertising
Silicon Follies A Vincent Foster for Usenet liberals? Silicon Follies Tipping the antitrust scales - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE - - - - - - - - - -
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From Agenda to Zoot
BY SCOTT ROSENBERG | The first thing I learned from the e-mail response to my column on "Personal information mismanagement" was that people are deeply passionate about their "personal information manager" (PIM) software. That column -- a lament over the state of software development in this important but under-recognized area -- provoked even more e-mail than my rundown of tech-industry buzzwords or my deliberately provocative call for Microsoft to free its Windows source code (though, to be sure, not nearly as much as my critique of the iMac). I learned that many of you are as irate as I am about the paucity of choices the commercial marketplace provides in the field of PIMs; that many of you still use old, outdated programs to organize your lives, as I do, because you love them even though their publishers don't; and that many of you still yearn to find software that adapts to the way we work instead of straitjacketing us in preordained templates and routines. But I learned a lot more: Readers also shared with me a vast range of thoughts, tips and suggestions on how they keep their lives and ideas organized with the software currently available. Having read all that e-mail, I have to admit that there are a lot more options out there than I realized -- or than a perusal of the software catalogs or the trade magazines would ever turn up. Some of these programs are shareware or labors of love; others are commercial products flying low under the radar of the industry players; still others are old, semi-discontinued products from big companies that dedicated bands of users still cling to and swear by. What's missing is any kind of central repository of information. (Yahoo's listing is a start, but it's woefully inadequate.) I'd like to at least begin to remedy that here, by pooling readers' ideas with links to software sites for personal information management junkies. But before getting to that good stuff, here are some of the observations and bits of advice I received on the general topic. Get a PalmPilot, some of you insisted. Others suggested, pityingly, that I should get a life: "If you have that much information, simplify," wrote Marc Plaisant. I think these readers misunderstood my point. The software industry defines PIMs as address-book-calendar-and-notes software; if addresses and appointments are what you want to track, you are reasonably well-served today by a variety of products. My complaint was that these programs aren't nearly flexible enough to help you track other kinds of information that may be unique to your needs. As an editor, I track story ideas and assignments in my favorite PIM, Ecco, now a discontinued product. Cheryl Fuller, a psychotherapist, wrote to tell me that she uses a now defunct Mac outliner program called ThinkTank to build a "searchable database of dreams." Why, I wondered, do the free-form PIMs -- the programs that I and so many of you still find so valuable and keep using long after their producers have orphaned them -- seem to fail in the commercial marketplace? There are two main theories: It's either programmers' fault, or it's our fault. Daniel Reinhold, a programmer himself, takes the former view: "The tools the programmer must use get in the way of creating good tools for the user ... What we need is a new programming model that takes the design out of the hands of the gearheads and puts it into the hands of non-technical but creative people. When the process of creating applications is more about expressing fluid and rich forms of interaction with the user and less about how to reduce a series of tasks into a series of bits, we will unleash the tremendous creative impulses out there waiting to be tapped." Gregory Tetrault, however, believes the trouble lies not with our programmers but with ourselves: "Applications that don't force the users into a rigid, predefined structure don't do well. Most users don't want to think about how to organize their contacts or notes or outlines or spreadsheets. They would rather follow someone else's conception of the best way. Users don't even customize the templates distributed with their word processors, PIMs, fax software, etc. People say they want software to work the way they want, but most users will not spend time personalizing an application." Ah, but not Salon readers! You are, it seems, PIM-addicted. Herewith, your suggestions for the PIM-deprived. - - - - - - - - - - - -
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