Develop Bugs

Are there any better PIM programs out there?

Does anyone know of any good Personal Information Management software for Windows Mobile? I am not asking a whole lot. Just be able to search for a key word among appointments, todos, notes shouldn't be too much to ask for, is it? The current Calendar and Task applications can't even do that.
Thanks!

there are a ton of them, google PIM, windows mobile and your search will come up with Pocket Informant, Agenda One, and a bunch of others.

thanks!
dmd1272 said:
there are a ton of them, google PIM, windows mobile and your search will come up with Pocket Informant, Agenda One, and a bunch of others.
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Actually, I have done a google search before. Like you said, there are a ton. Perhaps, I should change my question to which PIM is better for the WM 6.1.
thanks!

i have been using agenda one - works for everything I need and I am kinda picky. If theres something better fill me in. Download the free trial and see if you like it.

PIM
Try Papyrus or Agenda One - both are among the best

Agenda One not working very well
[email protected] said:
Try Papyrus or Agenda One - both are among the best
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Thank you for the suggestions! I downloaded the trial version of Agenda One - supposed to be full featured with time limit. I tried several searches - some search all, some search only in appointment, or only todos. None of them worked. It looked like the program tried for a while, then it simply terminated (not the search, but the entire Agenda one program). It kicked me back to the today screen, and the process no longer listed in the task list

Try the recently released Papyrus 2. It's frakkin' amazing

try agendus over at www.iambic.com

Agenda One is no go
anewbie said:
Thank you for the suggestions! I downloaded the trial version of Agenda One - supposed to be full featured with time limit. I tried several searches - some search all, some search only in appointment, or only todos. None of them worked. It looked like the program tried for a while, then it simply terminated (not the search, but the entire Agenda one program). It kicked me back to the today screen, and the process no longer listed in the task list
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Click to collapse
I signed up at Developer One support forum, and tried to post this question. It's been a couple of days, they don't even show my posting in the forum. I tried to ask the same question again, still blocked by the moderator. Oh well, moving on to Papyrus 2 trial now.

Thank you all for the suggestions! I thought I'd spend a few words sharing my opinions on the products I've been trying out:
Agenda One - in spite of the awards the company claims they have received, I find this product adds very little value to the existing WM 6.1 PIM functionality. Some pretty colors, that's it. When I started my quest for a better PIM, all I was looking for was a search function. Agenda One has it. I had made many variations of attempts to use it, search all, search in appointments only, search in todos only, search whole word, partial word, any words .... Not once did it ever complete the search with any result. Every single time, the function started, try for a while, then the program crashed. It simply terminate. I submitted the question to the company's support forum, the question itself didn't get posted until 5 days later - as the moderator has to screen every single post. When it did appear, other user indicated same problem on other smart phone as well. I'm not the only one.
Edit: the forum blocked my complaint, and finally come back with a question - it remotely sounds like it cares, but the question is useless. If they read my post, they would have found the answer there. I feel like dealing with a communist government official - sensor everything, sloooooooooow to respond and defend every criticism ...
Papyrus 2.0 - the calendar layouts are reasonably flexible, so you can customize how you want to see all the activities. The search is very fast, even if I have more than 30 matches, they show up as soon as the program finds them. There is one thing I don't like, but I suspect I may be able to figure out a way to change, that is, I only want to see todos that are not yet completed on a daily basis. Even though I have that specified, it is still showing me the todos that are already marked complete (not all of them, just the ones that have no dates associated with). To me, they are done, they are done. Why would I want to look at them everyday just because their complete dates were not marked? Other than that, everything seems to be pretty good. They've got nice colors just like Agenda One, and price is about the same.
Agendus Pro - Agendus Pro has a rich set of nice features - in addition to the regular calendar/todo/contact views, you can also access call log, email, quote of the day, day in history, weather forecast, and stock quote all from this application. I didn't think about these before, but, they are very nice to have. The cost of this product is no more than the others. Another nice feature - there is a tool bar (either on top or bottom of the screen) you can use to select the format of display (day view, week view, month view, list, contact, email, etc, etc. With the other products (Agenda One, and Papyrus), you have to press the view soft bottom, which brings up another screen that let you select the format. Agendus layout is more intuitive and direct.
Having said all of that, I do have a couple of complaints -
- Agendus Pro take up 3.7 MB, whereas Papyrus - 700 KB, Agenda One - 966 KB. These are the cab size, I know that Agendus Pro includes several language supports, which contribute to the bigger CAB size. Nevertheless, the memory foot print is still the biggest among the 3.
- my 2nd complaint is that when you load the program just to look at some details in an appointment, the program starts and you don't see anything in the calendar - it tells you that you don't have any activity. Then, a little box flashes "initializing ...", "initializing ...", "initializing ..." ... My screen went out 4 times before I can finally see the content of my day's calendar. If it takes less memory, I may just keep it running, which would not have the "initializing ..." problem. Since the program takes up so much memory, I don't want to keep it in the memory. This is a deal killer for me. It's too bad. I like the features a lot.
Edit: Since the above was written, I've tried two more software packages. Nothing stood out. One fenomenal ability make Papyrus shine among all the others is how fast the search function performs. Everyone else wait, and wait, and wait until they've collected all the matches and put them on the screen all at once. If you have a sizable database (mine has about 2000 entries), you'll be staring at a blank screen with a spinning wheel forever, the screen saver would kick in multiple times. Whereas Papyrus' search shows you the match results as it progresses through the database. Maybe the match I am looking for is the first couple out of 50, why would I need to wait until it finds 50 before showing me first two? That's just a simply logic. I don't get what the other developers were thinking ....
Needless to say, Papyrus 2.0 becomes my choice. Their forum is great, too! Very happy about this decision
thanks!

RSS Reader recommendations

I am looking for a mobile RSS Reader. Do not know much about them. am using pRSSreader and Viigo. Brand new to both but am really liking the feeds. Obviously free is nice, but would pay if it was a good reader. Want the full article, offline ability, ease of adding links, so new that I do not even know what i want - other than not to spend a lot of time entering links into a bad piece of software.
WM 6.1 Pro

Do a search for YomoMedia. Works great, looks nice, and you can manage your subscriptions from your PC as well as from the phone. And it's free.

i like that i can organize my feeds on the desktop. it has been difficult getting the feed urls entered into my device. with yomomedia, can you download the entire article and look at them offline?

thebrenda said:
i like that i can organize my feeds on the desktop. it has been difficult getting the feed urls entered into my device. with yomomedia, can you download the entire article and look at them offline?
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I'm testing it right now (great find by the way, thanks Commdr64!!), and on the few feeds I've tested so far, the full version of the article has been included with the downloaded updates, available when you're offline.
It's a nice clean interface, runs smooth, and I like that you can manage your subscriptions from the desktop

Correction
Ok, I've found some feeds now that don't have the full article downloaded for offline viewing...they download in the app, but only when you click a link for the full article. I can't seem to find any settings that change that behavior, so I'm guessing it's dictated by the feed and not the app.

Right now I'm using the default RSS reader installed which works great, but Yomomedia sounds also very interesting.

I use SPB News (Full Text News Reader ) it's pretty good here's a link , and it has a Free Trial. I use alot of SPB products.
http://www.spbsoftwarehouse.com/pocketpc-software/news/

BioTecK said:
Right now I'm using the default RSS reader installed which works great, but Yomomedia sounds also very interesting.
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What default RSS Reader? My HTC TP2 does not have one.

sirphunkee said:
Ok, I've found some feeds now that don't have the full article downloaded for offline viewing...they download in the app, but only when you click a link for the full article. I can't seem to find any settings that change that behavior, so I'm guessing it's dictated by the feed and not the app.
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I was thinking that some feeds would not want the article downloaded. I am new to it but why would they want to give you the full article? Would think that they would want you to go to the site. Anyway ... I will download tonight and play with it.

RSS reader
I spend almost an hour in a train on my way to work/home and need a reader that can retrieve articles for offline reading. So recently I spent my whole weekend testing about 13 rss readers and podcast catchers - all i could find on the web. thought i would share my experience. I actually installed all of them and compared one by one. In my opinion the best reader is Egress and it is far superior than any of the readers both by the number of features it has and also customizations you can do. The only feature that this reader does not have compared to all others is that it is not designed to sync with online/desktop readers. I do not need that because in the train i read specific feeds only and leave the rest for desktop reading. It has not been updated for some time (i think it went to android), but even now its touch interface and visual looks are very modern. It is not free... The second best is Yomomedia, though it installs few things on device even though you choose Storage card.

wondering if you tried pRSSreader? it is not verying finger friendly and it is pretty stripped down. but i am a stock WM person - no too interested in the flash. but so far i like thr pRSSreader. don't know enough to know all the features. i do like that i can flag and save the likes to delicious to look at later on my desktop.

thebrenda said:
wondering if you tried pRSSreader? it is not verying finger friendly and it is pretty stripped down. but i am a stock WM person - no too interested in the flash. but so far i like thr pRSSreader. don't know enough to know all the features. i do like that i can flag and save the likes to delicious to look at later on my desktop.
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Yes, I tried pRSSreader as well and still have it on my device. However, I do not need an article to be saved for further reading in delicious (actually, i do not think such option is available in pRSSreader , as far as i can remember viigo has it).
egress is actually not flashy at all, just very convenient for use with fingers: scrolling up and down or left and right is well thought and produces intuitive results. The real winner is actually customizations available in its Options menu. For example, pRSSreader allows you define global setting on how to retrieve offline/webcontent. Egress allows both global and per feed customizations. You can organize your feeds, say, using Google reader and then export opml file to egress. I believe you can get 30-day trial version of egress, just try it.

how do you think egress compares with pRSSreader?
i save the feeds/urls in delicious because it is an easy way for me to flag them for later review on my desktop.

thebrenda said:
how do you think egress compares with pRSSreader?
i save the feeds/urls in delicious because it is an easy way for me to flag them for later review on my desktop.
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I believe i have replied in my previous post. Also as I mentioned in my first post, there is a free excellent alternative - Yomomedia.

SpeedReader 1.5

HD2 vs. Desire - after experience

Hello guys. I had for more than half year a HD2, before that I had an iPhone for more than 2 years, and since 3 days I am a proud owner of a Desire. And I wanted to share my thoughts about it.
1. Comparing the general design of HD2 and Desire - the later feels more solid in your hands. This rubbery feeling of the back cover gives you more grip. In my opinion the build quality is better than the HD2. The bigger screen of HD2 was huge point to impress your friends, but it was too wide for use as a phone. Too big for everyday use.
2. Comparing the screens - the screen of the Desire looks awesome. AMOLED actually rules. Forget about it's not readable in direct sun light. If you enable the auto brightness, it's more than readable outside. Even in a hot day like yesterday (more than 35 degrees Celsius) and very bright sun shining, there was no problem to read whatever you want. And those 16M colors - maaan those home screens looks nice.
3. Comparing the OSs - that's actually the reason I ditched the HD2. After more than 3 days of use, I can say that I love Android. It's everything that I wanted. Windows Mobile was one ugly son of b**tch. Every single 3th party application looked like a windows 3.1. I don't want to go back to 1995, I want a good looking GUI.
The idea of home screens and widgets is brilliant. Customizing was one of things I loved with Windows Mobile, but the beautifully widgets, the nicely done icons of the applications and the awesome AMOLED screen - rules them all. The slogan of Apple "We have an app for everything" (or was everybody) should not be an advertisement. They have an app for everything, but most of the time you use 10% of the functionality of the app. Why not have a widget of that app, that only covers those 10 percent. It's more practical, fast and easy to use.
Yeah, windows mobile did have MyPhone, but compared with google way of syncing you "priceless" information - maan google is years ahead. Before I had a dozen of word documents and when I update them in my phone, I had to manually copy them to the home pc or the office one. But what happens when I update the same document on my phone and then on my pc and try to merge them... conflict. Now with Google Docs, the moment I update my documents, they are already updated on internet and I can access them from wherever pc or mac I want. The only draw back is that I can't seem to find a good spreadsheet editor to edit the online Google Docs Spreadsheet on my phone, but probably I will.
The Calendar sync also works great - you have a web calendar with all your appointments.
The Google market - wow there are a lot of great free apps. BTW, google, please enable paid apps in Bulgaria, pleeeease.
Google Goggles rules. I am a developer and I still can't understand how it works. Those google developers really know what they are doing.
I loved my iGO navigation software on the HD2, because it has a very precise maps for my country and I was worry if I am able to find a good navigation software for the Desire. Actually I found MOTONAV, an extension of the iGO that can work the the maps of the general iGO, and actually it is better experience than the HD2.
...more to come...
Sorry for the messy story, but I just wrote whatever thoughts came into my mind about the new phone and probably the it's a little bit hard to read.
I really do not miss my HD2, even a bit. I can't even think of one thing that the HD2 is better. Not one.... maybe internet tethering, but that won't be a problem when Froyo comes.

I came from the HD2 as well and I think I made the right choice too.
Wifi tethering is fully working on Eclair Android 2.1 as well. Have a look here. No need to wait for Froyo.
Edit : and regarding paid apps, search for Market Enabler.

[Q] Text Zooming - Autofit?

One thing I really liked about my Nexus One was when I was on a web page and I zoomed text, it would autofit it (left to right) on the screen.
That way if I needed to make the text a little bigger I could in order to easily read it.
This didn't work 100%, it was more like when the text was in it's own table cell. But that's still 90% of the text out there.
With WP7, I notice this feature does not exist. Some pages are quite hard to read (even landscaped) when they fit.. and shifting left to right for each line is a bugger.
Anyone heard if this is going to be added to the browser functionality?

android is the unique os that does this. even on iOS, it performs the same as WP. if you want this feature, i'd suggest recommending it to windowsphone via twitter, or on social.microsoft.com, but i doubt you'll get much response about it apart from "we will pass it on".

Text reflow, nope haven't heard a word about it.

The Gate Keeper said:
android is the unique os that does this.
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What? WM6.5 did this just fine on my HD2 also.
I'm not entirely sure if it's something we want brought over though. Sure, it is a great feature for some webpages, but IMO the majority displays fine (and readable) as is. I feel text reflow may cause more problems than it's worth in terms of browser performance. WP7 may not seem to load as fast as e.g. Android but if you are looking for information buried half way down the page I often find you get to it faster on WP7 anyhow - it doesn't seem to suffer from the same rendering lag as the droids. If this is directly connected to reflow or not I don't know, but I have a feeling it may be.

you would of had it on your wm6.5 through opera? i was more referring to natively.
but yea i agree with you, most of the time reflow isn't needed.

[Q] Best PDF annotator for university

I've found a few threads on this, but nothing related exactly to the nexus 7.
Just bought mine, mostly to use for university since I have to read dozens of pdfs and books each year, and wanted to save on printing.
I've had Ezpdf for some time, and while it works really well it has a tendency to crash when I'm highlighting... not fun... its slow to save so I lose a few pages of notation each time it crashes.
I have it hooked to dropbox, which is vital.
Anyone know of a better pdf annotator that works just as well and can sync with dropbox?
btw, I've used qpdf which I found real clunky and iAnnotate which is still taking baby steps.
Anyone else?

GuySmiles said:
I've found a few threads on this, but nothing related exactly to the nexus 7.
Just bought mine, mostly to use for university since I have to read dozens of pdfs and books each year, and wanted to save on printing.
I've had Ezpdf for some time, and while it works really well it has a tendency to crash when I'm highlighting... not fun... its slow to save so I lose a few pages of notation each time it crashes.
I have it hooked to dropbox, which is vital.
Anyone know of a better pdf annotator that works just as well and can sync with dropbox?
btw, I've used qpdf which I found real clunky and iAnnotate which is still taking baby steps.
Anyone else?
Click to expand...
Click to collapse
I think you can use Mendeley for your academic purposes.
http://blog.mendeley.com/tipstricks/android-on-mendeley-an-app-guide/

_Sasan_ said:
I think you can use Mendeley for your academic purposes.
http://blog.mendeley.com/tipstricks/android-on-mendeley-an-app-guide/
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Click to collapse
I'm sold! Thanks for the tip.

_Sasan_ said:
I think you can use Mendeley for your academic purposes.
http://blog.mendeley.com/tipstricks/android-on-mendeley-an-app-guide/
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I spoke too soon. Just checked and there are only beta alternate apps for android. None of them allow for pdf note-taking.

I've used iAnnotate in the past and liked it. But now since Adobe Reader has annotating capabilities, I just use it.

imho Adobe Reader is just enough for everything. I have yet to find a better one...

I was trying to use Adobe reader, but its lack of cloud support make it much more difficult.
I just found Foxit pdf for android (have no idea how I missed it last time). Looks like the perfect match for studies. Never found foxit written down on any other forum site. Its an amazing app so far and looking forward to further development.

Buy EZPDF. Now.
That is all.
But seriously, it IS the best annotator out there. Underlining, strikethroughs, double-page viewing, TONS of options and settings, drawing, highlighting, custom colours for all of these writing tools, text boxes - the works. And it's pretty quick, too.
The crashes while highlighting, by the way, have JUST been introduced - Android 4.3 seemed to cause them. They're the biggest annoyance for me, too. The crash is directly tied to the length of time you hold your finger down. Around ~3 seconds seems to trigger it on my Nexus 10. They're quick to address bug reports, I'd suggest emailing them.

Repligo is the best. Sorry but nothing comes close...