Agendus Pro Calendar Capabilities
In an earlier article I extolled the virtues of Agendus contact features. But Agendus is known mostly for its time management. Agendus makes your calendar work for you, and considering the power and flexibility of this application, it does it all fairly easily.
Let’s first take a look at the today screen. With the day, date, and time clear at the top of the screen, you can view your day laid out before you. I like to be well prepared, so the first thing I want to see is what the future holds. But Agendus lets you set the order, as well as giving you the option of not seeing any option. As you can see from the following screen shot, you set the order and importance of your today screen options.
You can set the size of the font you use, as well as a wallpaper, or just a plain color background of your choice.
You may recall my admission of love for icons. You can see icons next to each event in the today view in the previous screenshot. Given my love for icons, one of my favorite features in Agendus is Vivid Agendus. Vivid Agendus allows you to pre-determine icons and colors. Doctor and dentist visits, school functions, club meetings, parties. These are not necessarily repeating events, but certainly frequent events. How nice to be able to just put the time and date, and note “school” and have Vivid Agendus add in the icon for the school mascot and highlight it with the school color! Any step you save, saves you time.
For the busier people, the most important question is “when can I schedule another meeting?” To help answer that, Agendus gives you a free time finder.
As with all options within Agendus, the free time finder is highly customizable, straightforward, and easy to use.
Do you conduct meetings? Do you hate taking your agenda with you when you have your Treo? With the walk through feature, you can go paperless. With any meeting, just put your agenda in the Notes section. Precede each item with a “-” and when you go to the meeting view, you’ll see a handy check box next to each item.
Notice that the check boxes are usable! I love this feature. Need to reschedule, cancel, or schedule another meeting at the last minute? From the Today (or any view), you can tap and hold the meeting to pop up a very convenient list of options. Don’t want to take your stylus out? You don’t have to.
Use your 5 way nav button to get everything done quickly. Highlight the meeting, and right arrow opens the popup list. This is the easiest and fastest way to get back to your walk through list to make last minute changes. And since you won’t want to be disturbed during this meeting (or any meeting), you can check the box in the Meetings preferences, to mute device during meetings. This way, you never have to worry about forgetting to slide the mute button on – or off.
One of my favorite features is the trip planner. I like it because flights out of Mobile, AL are never simple. No matter where I want to go, I can’t get there from here without going through Atlanta or Charlotte. My flights are always multiple legs.
Creating a trip is pretty effortless. You start the same way you would create a meeting, new contact, or task. It brings up a simple screen where you can enter your destination, departure and return dates, and purpose. Notice the small icon in the upper right hand corner of the Edit Trip screen: clicking here will allow you to see the current weather in your destination location. Once you’ve created your trip, it shows up as a Meeting. Here is where you can add the important stuff.
Once you’ve clicked on the trip from the meeting, or entered trip view, you start adding items. Iambic has thought of pretty much everything here, but I find myself using Flight, Rental Car, and Lodging with most trips. Clicking on Flight, a new screen opens where you can enter flight information: date, time, airline, flight, etc. Clicking either the date or time box will bring you to a familiar screen where you can pick the date/time. Instead of typing in the airline with each trip, Agendus includes a fairly comprehensive drop down list of airlines. You can also just start typing the airline, and it works in a text completion manner.
Continue adding items until all portions of your trip have been entered, and you’ll see your plans neatly laid out for you. It’s a whole lot nicer than entering flight information in memos, and far more conveniently laid out. Meetings, calls, and tasks can also be added to trips.
Combine these capabilities with the versatility offered by Agendus’ contacts, and you’ll find you ca easily manage the most hectic schedule. Agendus is available for both Palm OS and Windows mobile devices.
Related Links
Review: Agendus Pro and Contacts Management
Agendus for Palm OS Premier Edition
Agendus for Palm OS Professional Edition
Agendus for Palm OS Standard Edition
Agendus for Windows Outlook Edition
Agendus for Windows Palm Desktop Edition
Agendus Mail for Palm OS SSL Edition
Filed under: Software reviews
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What I’d like is the ability to add icons to the month view that the default Palm calendar has. I’d like to be able to tell what each event is, not just have a dot for an event. Does Agendus do this?
Yes, Fred*. When you look at the month view in Agendus you can see either the times or the icons. Totally customizable.
Agendus never fails to impress me with just how powerful and customizable it can be, yet is fairly easy to use without even reading the documentation.
Still, I would recommend that all Agendus users print out the user guide and open it up every once in a while to see some of the cool features you didn’t know about. There are lots of good surprises lurking in Agendus that can make keeping track of your busy schedule easier and more fun.
Although Agendus is very full featured, this version (11.1-10) has been particularly buggy. I add trips and they disappear, certain views cause the Treo to reset because of recurring meetings and I don’t think Blackberry is as compatible as it should be.
I like it but sometimes it causes a ton of problems. Older versions have been more stable.
Scripps
I use many of the features of the Agendus calendar, but the primary screen I look at is the month view. I have it filled with a variety of icons, so that I can see at a glance what I am doing each day in the next few weeks. From there, it is extremely easy to tap on a particular day to find out what times I have meetings, appts, calls, etc. This program has helped me immensely in managing my busy life!
How is timezone management now? This is the reason I went with DateBk5 years ago, even though Agendus was prettier….
If I schedule a meeting on the other coast, and then travel over there, will it move it correctly once my Treo adjusts to the new local timezone?
I can’t answer that one right now, idean, but I will have it answered for you on 4/18!
Without disagreeing with any of the positives in your posting, I’d like to point out some serious problems with Agendus.
1) It basically is unusable if you use both the Palm and Outlook versions with Exchange Calendering. This comes both from lack of proper integration in Agendus as well as the fact that Agendus, rather than have a private database, adds text to your calendar entries. When you invite people to a meeting, for example, they get all of the Agendus markup.
2) Due largely to the strategy of using markup in calendar items, the startup time of Agendus calendar is roughly proportional to the number of appointments in your calendar. If you like to never delete anything from your calendar (eg: sometimes I need to lookup the date of a doctor’s appointment from years earlier), then Agendus startup becomes unbearable.
3) The Agendus support team is highly responsive to its customers but frequently responds by telling them they are wrong. If you look at their forum, there are tons of complaints about the startup problem, as well as others, and the official reply is that the users are using their calendar wrong. Furthermore, as new features are added, it seems that startup is becoming worse. The forums are filled with users who upgraded to a newer version of Agendus and then downgraded to their original version because they didn’t think the additional startup overhead was worth the incremental features.
In general, I really love the product. I think it has a user interface that is tons better than Outlook’s or any of the other Palm calendars. That being said, the unbearably slow startup (it can take minutes and telling someone “Only 1 more minute.” before you can schedule a meeting makes you look pretty silly) and the poor integration with Exchange calendaring make it unusable for me.
Now, if I was not using Exchange calendering I might be willing to try and workaround the startup problem as it is such a great tool.
Neil Smithline
Hi,
I’d first like to thank Alli for a great review of some of the greater features of Agendus for Palm.
Secondly, I’d like to ask some questions about a couple of the more negative comments above:
-Tags on the notes: This is a common practice of most PIM replacements, with a couple of exceptions of course. Without having our own database, as mentioned here, this is the only effective method.
-EAS use with Agendus: I am using EAS and Agendus both, and have no problems
-Loss of Trip info: This is a known issue and in our list of things to address
In closing, we are aware of some slow startups for some users, and also some random stability issues for some as well. Our satisfaction records, however indicate that the vast majority of users do not have these issues. Despite this, we are constantly trying to reproduce and remedy these as efficiently and as quickly as possible, while maintaining a large line of other products as well.
-Michael
iambic, Inc.
PS: I can’t leave without a plug for the WM users out there who may be reading this. Agendus for Windows Mobile PPC is now available. SmartPhone (no touchscreen device) coming soon. http://www.iambic.com/agenduspro/wmppc/
I’d also like to confirm Neilbaby’s views on Agendus’s severe lack of stability. I was a loyal user for Agendus 9 through 11, but the program got more and more crash-prone as the versions progressed. It would randomly crash my Treo upon launching the program (my guess is that Agendus poorly manages the dbCache), would mess up contacts linking, even with a fresh database overwritten by my Mac. If you’d like further evidence of its bugginess, look at the forums at Iambic and look at all the posts reporting stability problems.
Datebk6 definitely does not have as pretty a user interface, but at least I don’t make appointments with fear of a crash.
I’d also like to confirm Neilbaby’s views on Agendus’s severe lack of stability. I was a loyal user for Agendus 9 through 11, but the program got more and more crash-prone as the versions progressed. It would randomly crash my Treo upon launching the program (my guess is that Agendus poorly manages the dbCache), would mess up contacts linking, even with a fresh database overwritten by my Mac. If you’d like further evidence of its bugginess, look at the forums at Iambic and look at all the posts reporting stability problems.
Datebk6 definitely does not have as pretty a user interface, but at least I don’t make appointments with fear of a crash.
i’m afraid that i decided to stick with datebk. it’s a workhorse! i tried agenda and was initially stunned at how awesome it seemed. then, my meeting requests from my co-workers across the country started shifting by 2 hours inexplicably. timezones are NOT handled properly by agendus. period. my trial period told me that within a day. i work with people in every time zone in the united states and all my meeting requests from exchange were all over the map. i was sad to see this. additionally, i experienced numerous re-boots of my treo.
i’ll try agendus again in a year because it’s gorgeous. however, you can’t judge a book by its cover. :(