Review: Extreme Agenda for PPC

Birdsoft (see my Extreme Text review), who has been making WM smartphone (read non-touchscreen) software for years now has recently adapted one of their most popular productivity apps to the WM professional platform: Extreme Agenda (v3.1) ($24.95).

Admittedly, the default calendar, contacts and the rest of the PIM features on WM are a bit underwhelming. Sure, for basics they do their job but what really attracts people to WM in the first place is one word: customization. They want specific colors, only certain days to show, linking between notes & contacts, specific views, etc. And wherever there is a whole, there is some crafty 3rd party developer waiting to fill it. Unfortunately for you the consumer, you may be overwhelmed at the choices: Agenda One, Agenda Fusion, Pocket Informant, Agendus….yikes. How to choose and where does Extreme Agenda now fit in the picture? Read on for the full skinny!

Extreme Agenda (EA from here on) fits in nicely with the competition and brings some new features to the table as well. The program is not overwhelming (like Pocket Informant can be) but not underwhelming either—in other words, it’s a nice middle-of-the-road PIM application, for someone who wants more than what the default has to offer but does not need thousands of options or the need to schedule every minutia in their life.

Installation + Program Overview

The program is a surprisingly tiny ~575kb .cab file and takes very little resources on the device both in terms of RAM and ROM, which is an important consideration for many. In turn, bearing in mind all the features EA has to offer, the program turns out to be one of the zippiest of PIM apps around.

To list all the features of EA would easily take a full page but they are important, so here they are right from Birsoft:

Agenda Views

• Calendar, Week, Year, and Agenda Views
• Week Grid View shows 5 or 7 days worth of info
• Month Preview Pane - 2 Formats on Landscape
• Show Calendar Bars and/or Category Icons on the Month View
• View 7 Days worth of information in the handy Dates/Agenda List View
• Birthday/Anniversary Support
• Appointment Meeting Handling
• Appointment Templates - Big Timesaver!!

Tasks

• Sort using Name, Priority, Category, Sensitivity, Completed, or Due Date.
• Enhanced Task Creation
• Task Preview Pane for easy Reference.
• Quickly Delete all of your Completed Tasks.
• Task Templates
• The Only Task Program you will ever need!

Contacts

• Contact Photo Support - No Silly Photo Bar.
• Sort by Category, Company or Name
• Alpha Search to Limit Contact List
• Complete Call Log for Each Contact
• Create Appts. or Tasks from a Contact

Extreme Wallet

• 256-bit Blowfish Encryption Securely locks your data files.
• Store Credit Cards, PINs, Website Information, Bank Accounts and more...
• Category Filtering
• Password Masking
• Safety Timeout Feature

Projects

• 3 Levels of Projects to better organize
• Include Pocket Outlook Data and Links and Files.
• Task Progress Bars show completion of Projects Tasks
• System uses very little space to save your information

I’ll leave it up to the discerning reader to parse that list and decide if those features are necessary as I can’t possibly judge what you specifically need. Suffice it to say that EA comes with features aplenty. In fact the “Projects” and “Wallet” features were two surprises that I had not expected in such an application, though I now see their necessity.

Usage and UI

From my experience, this is where Birdsoft excels: 1-handed usage. When a programmer develops applications for non-touchscreen devices, obviously the 1-handed issue is mucho-importante. What is nice here for EA is that it is an adaptation of the Smartphone version, so all that 1-handed optimization comes for free. Indeed while using EA it is one of the main outstanding features and a pure joy to use, especially on front-qwerty devices like the WM Treo. Couple this with the speed of the program (due to its tiny size) and you have what I consider one of the most user friendly, intuitive and fast PIM apps around.

One of the “new” things in PIM apps that EA has is the “Spinner” which is certainly an interesting way to select what part of the program you want to go to: Week view, Month view, Contacts, Tasks, etc. All the items in the Spinner are optional (as is the Spinner itself)—in fact you add a specific contact or even a website to the Spinner if you like. I did find the directionality of the Spinner a bit odd—that is I expect it to go one way but it goes another (left vs. right on the Dpad) but this is one of those orientations issues where you get used to after awhile, or as mentioned, you can disable the Spinner entirely and just go the Menu route (what I ended up doing).

While the UI on EA is very intuitive and easy to navigate I will say the graphics are lacking a bit, especially compared to some of the competition. This of course is a pure aesthetic issue and does not detract from the usage of the program, but some might find the graphics a bit blocky and not as pretty. Then again, certain applications like the calendar look quite nice, especially with some of the bar-effects that can be applied. In addition, the “plainness” of the application also lends itself to easy, clear reading on the go.

Let’s Customize

EA comes out of the box basically ready to use and a lot of people will probably do very little tweaking—but lets just say you’re the type who likes to play, well EA allows you to adjust about every aspect of the UI, specially the colors of everything, bar thickness, number of days to show and what items to show. That last one is important: personally I hate having PIM apps that just overwhelm you with information. When in EA, you can disable, say, Contacts from even showing up in a menu—don’t want to use it? It’s gone and you could almost forget the program has that element (but still there under Options).

This ability to “hide” features you don’t want, need or have other means is really a nice aspect as it allows you to control the complexity of the program. EA also manage to hide redundancy: if you are in Week view on the calendar, when you select the menu for Views > Schedule, Week view does not show up—just your remaining options—that sort of thing makes navigation much quicker as you’re brain is processing less visual information.

Likewise, the Search feature (optionally searches Tasks, Appointments and/or Contacts) is highlight in the menu with some special characters to catch your attention and hot-keyed with “S” --> ..::Search.. These little tweaks to the UI make EA a breeze to use.

Usage and Final Thoughts

My litmus test: when making a new appointment on your WM device a couple of things are imperative: speed of the program, number of key-clicks to get there and ease-of-use for the UI. Extreme Agenda really shines in this area. After the program-launch, it takes 2-clicks (no Dpad) to get to the New Appointment screen and entering in that appointment is just fast with big, bold text—especially for the date/time selections which are large enough to mash with your thumbs (no stylus!).

Overall I have to give a high-rating to Extreme Agenda: it’s fast, stable, intuitive and has extreme (har!) ease-of-use. It doesn’t really offer anything amazingly new as far as PIM functions when compared to the competition (it does do as much as the rest) and is not as “pretty” as the bunch but it’s in the actual day-to-day usage where Extreme Agenda has an edge.

So if you are looking for a new PIM app, I would give it shot and definitely compare it to the rest of the herd to see which fits you the best. For my “Gosh I’m busy but I’m not meeting or calling 2,000 people this week” life it works quite well—speed and ease trump all.