One of the tools that has eluded me all these year is a nicely integrated suite of Contact Management, Scheduler/Calendar/Organizer and a ToDolist.
Having tried many tools – from standalone applications to hosted applications, none of them lasted a month. I’m using some tools of course but I’m not settled down with them (like the way I switched to Open Office and never look back).
My requirements are really simple
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Open Source or Free would be perfect
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Would also consider hosted application and pay a small fee
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Integrated, for example
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a date (like birthday) in the contact list would appear in the calendar and could also be a todo (send birthday card)
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a schedule like “Meet with XYZ” will link to XYZ contact information
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similarly a todo like “Call XYZ” will link to XYZ mobile number
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Able to import and export to some standard formats
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Must support Chinese character input
So help me. If you know THAT tool, leave a comment.
And if you still have time, read on for a chronicle of tools I had tried.
The one application that I enjoyed using was Palm Desktop, 7 years ago. Since then I lost my Palm, changed PC, reinstalled OS while Palm Desktop became a bloat. I never went back, not sure how it fare now.
MSD Organizer has a freeware version that has an excellent set of features. It wasn’t very stable with Vista and I didn’t install it again when I reinstall Vista. Nevertheless it is worth looking at if you are looking for an integrated suite.
When I got an O2 Stealth a few months ago, I defected briefly to Outlook since there was no easy way to sync between the Windows Mobile smart phone and the desktop. But it was not to last when I lost the phone weeks after. Certainly it would be a while before I get another smartphone.
For a long time I was really looking forward to Sunbird. But Sunbird wasn’t developed as fast as Firefox and I moved from Thunderbird to GMail. As of this writing, Sunbird is still not ready for prime time.
So for now, GMail just takes care my email contact list and that it. Someone at Google should really look at improving the usability of the GMail contact list. I still have plenty of data stuck at Yahoo Mail‘s contact list, which by the way, is much more usable than GMail’s. Maybe I’ll go back to Yahoo.
More dates and schedules are starting to get into Google Calendar but it just doesn’t encourage me to use it often. It takes a lot of effort just to remember, open it, enter the details. Part of the problem is also because I have a few GMail accounts for personal, work and others, so it gets messy to switch between user and or to use one as default.
My latest Todo tool is Todoist. Todoist is clean and easy to use and I like the simplicity of it all. But it is not as integrated as I hope a ToDo list would be. I should mention that there is a GMail integration though and it is a very handy feature.
The Web2.0 era introduced many interesting tools, among which Zoho looks like a serious contender to Google Apps.
Have a look at time & chaos. Might suit you, although not open source or free.
http://www.chaossoftware.com/chaos.asp
Thanks Pavlos, I have seen Chaos but never try it. Maybe I will try it IF I find some time.
Ken,
Have you looked at Lightning, the new Thunderbird calendaring and to-do extension? It’s basically Sunbird, enhanced, and tightly integrated with Thunderbird. (See this screen shot of my thunderbird/lightening install.)
Since gmail now offers IMAP support, you can set up Thunderbird to access your gmail account via IMAP, and use gmails drafts, sent, trash, spam, and archive folders. There’s some tricks to getting it set up correctly, but they’re easy to do. Check out this tutorial over at Lifehacker on how to set up tbird to deal properly with gmails folders (the archive and star folders are there, too, along with any other folders you designate). You’ll have the same stuff in tbird and gmail. tbird at home/office, gmail.com on the road.
There are also a few thunderbird extensions that give you the keyboard shortcut functionality of gmail. Search the thunderbird extension website for those.
Hope this helps you combine everything you need into one fail swoop (someone needs to bundle it, already).
Hey Eric, thanks for this suggestion!
I knew about it but never try it since I use GMail directly off the browser.
So far I had stuck with Todoist. I must say it’s the longest I have stuck with an online tool.
Under Firefox I simply put https://mail.google.com/mail/|http://todoist.com as homepage and both sites open up every time I fire up the browser. Very handy. No install, just web applications.
Slowly I’m find myself buying into the idea of “the web is the computer”.
Hi Ken,
You might find Remember The Milk useful since you are using Gmail (as I do).
http://www.rememberthemilk.com/
Good luck and be sure to comment back when you finally decide on the best fit for yourself.
Clif
“the best things in life are still free”
http://freewarewiki.com/NewsLetters
Thanks Clif,
I did try Remember the Milk but can’t remembered why i didn’t go with it back then.
Todist seems to be gradually abandoned as the developer started working on another project. Maybe I will give RTM another try.
Just had someone write in about Spicebird beta, have you seen it yet?
http://www.spicebird.com/en-US/spicebird/screenshots
Looks like a possible good Outlook replacement once the bugs are worked out.
Best wishes,
Clif
“the best things in life are still free”
http://freewarewiki.com/NewsLetters