An In-Depth Review of Iambic's Agendus for the Blackberry

Something funny - whenever I go to actually post something here, I always think I should pretend I have a VAST number of readers - even though I know I get about 2 hits a day. For those plucky few who do come here sporadically - thank you very much. So, you (both) will be my "long time readers" from now on. Please identify yourselves in the comments section...

Longtime readers will know that I used Iambic's Agendus for my Palm T|E, long before I switched to Blackberry. I have now been pointed towards the Iambic website, becuase they have now launched Agendus for the Blackberry. Very cool, thinks I, and worthy of blogging about.

So, I whip over and download a copy last weekend - it's a free trial, after all, why not. Surprising to me, but the trial is apparently only a 10 day trial. Hurry up and test it out if you are going to, before you plunk your money down. Even if you don't get enough, it is only $19.95, so a good deal all 'round.

Overview

It has all the wonderful Agendus-y things I remember from my days on the Palm. First, and most importantly to me, this lays overtop of your existing applications. That means that it uses your Blackberry's built-in Calendar, Tasks, etc., and will sync seamlessly to your Exchange server, if that is your environment. It also means that it is very lightweight by comparison to some of the other programs that seem to insist on replacing those built in applications with new ones.

It has a very nice looking today screen. It has the great fonts and the tremendously flexible colour coding that Agendus had. I wasn't that big on the colour coding, really, but there you have it. What it doesn't have is the icon-laden stuff from the Palm version, but that's a Blackberry limitation, not a Palm limitation. None the less, as with all versions of Agendus, it looks great. And that is one of the biggest problems.

Today Screen

The today screen, which you can see here, is very nice - it looks great. It puts everything together in one solid view, and includes a weather forecast, a quote of the day, and a "This Day in History" item. These three worked intermittently through the trial, but they are really frippery anyway, and aside from the weather (for which I use the excellent Weather Network application) I don't necessarily see the need for them anyway. I don't have the tasks showing on my copy, but you can see that they fall under the calendar. You can user-select the number of items to show in each section (I went for 4 for the test), and your colour preferences certainly transfer over. One thing that I cannot fathom about the today view is that there is no way to send a new e-mail from the today view. In fact, the only way to get to the BB e-mail application is to select an e-mail from your list of Recent Messages, which doesn't jive for me - if you have no new ones because your In-Box is at zero....?

Calendar



The calendar is a nice clean interface, which looks great. Navigating around, however, is somewhat difficult. First off, I have a recurring appointment coming for Monday - it is an annual, and happens every year on that day, because it is my boss' birthday. That doesn't show up until Tuesday. Pardon? That is a poor move, isn't it. When you open it, it shows the date as the 27th, but in every calendar view, it shows up as a full-day event, not busy, on the 28th. That doesn't help. Also, manouvering around the calendar is somewhat difficult. Frankly, the BB interface for the Calendar is very slick to work in if you have one of the Blackberrys with a trackball rather than the trackwheel. If you want to go to, say, next week, you just hold down the ALT key and scroll the ball to the right. Well, in Agendus, you have to pull up the menu, an then select view, and then scroll to Next Week (which is bizzarly UNDER the selection for Previous Week), and then click it. Way too fiddly to move forward one day or one week, or whatever. The daily and weekly views look great, but I'm not sure they are more user friendly than the built-in application, which should be the whole goal.


Contacts

The contacts, again, look great. You can do all the standard things like call them, e-mail them, edit their details, assign categories, and now assign colours. Great! You can also link a contact to a meeting, which is something I did always love about Agendus. It doesn't have the history of the contact (meetings, calls, etc.,) that you might expect if you are a former Agendus user, but again that was mere frippery and occasionally useful to me. True road-based salesmen are currently stampeding to my door to attack me at this point. But the contacts do look really good, don't they? I espeically like the contact-card style view, to the left, which has the name and compay front and centre, with the person's title just below. It puts the emphasis where it should be - on the people, not on the 67 different numbers at which you can reach them, not to mention their 45 e-mail addresses and the PIN addresses... it makes the whole thing very much more human, and seems a simple enough modification that RIM should consider something like that for the contact display for their next OS update. It is a really nice way to actually view the contacts, and is actually easier on my (really they shouldn't be but they are) aging eyes.


Tasks

This being YAGTDB (Yet Another GTD Blog), the review could not possibly be complete without looking at the task view. There it is, to the right. Look at the pretty colours. The organization by colour is all "Category" (Context) driven, so for all the true GTD'ers out there, if you can memorize what 15 colours mean, then this little puppy is the program you've been waiting for. If I was able to think to that level of organization I doubt I would be looking at GTD in the first place, but to each their own. Here is a program you can get lost in and do as much endless hacking as you want, seemingly just with colours alone!

My Opinion...

I found Agendus to be quite a nice piece of software. Very familiar and "old home week" to me, and I'm sure that if I installed the Outlook component that I would be working in that oh-so-familiar environment that I liked on my Palm. I will point out that this is Iambic's first kick at the software, and that it did crash on my a couple of times - once trying to add a contact to a meeting, another time just out of apparent randomness. That, I'm sure, will be found and dealt with.

The main problem that I see is that Agendus looks great. That is what it does. It looks great, but it doesn't necessarily help me in my day-to-day striving to just do stuff. In fact, the program leaves me with a couple of things that, truly, I don't understand. Iambic is a pretty intelligent company. They develop for many platforms, including the Symbian (a phone OS), Windows Mobile (which does have phone-enabled PDAs), Palm (makers of the Treo phone-enabled PDA) and now the Blackberry. You would think that they had a mechanism to tell you:

"PSST!!! HEY!!! WHEN I WAS ON VIBRATE WHEN YOU WERE IN THAT MEETING? YOU MISSED A CALL!!! PS - the call was from Bob".

No, no such luck. That would be smart, but it isn't there! I'm astounded that it doesn't tell you that. And while we are on the subject of things to be astounded by, I naturally looked around for reviews. At the time of writing this, I think this is the most comprehensive review of Agendus for the BB that there is on the 'net. One that I did read was Matthew Miller over at ZDNet. He points out that the software "adjusts for your selected theme". Not sure how. I know it keeps the SMS messages out of my inbox, like I ask my theme to do. But aside from that? When I booted up my Palm, Agendus is what showed there. When I reach for my BB, it isn't Agendus. It is still the "Today Plus" theme. The part I scratch my head about is that it CAN'T BE AGENDUS BECAUSE AGENDUS DOESN'T COME WITH A THEME TO HELP IT, IT IS JUST THE SOFTWARE.

This to me is the single biggest limiting step to using Agendus. Nice though it is, you have to run the program at all times. I do run other things on my BB, so I would be exiting out all the darn time. If it had all the functionality and a theme, I would be sold, provided the could put my boss' birthday on the right day, and maybe work on the calendar navigation a bit. However, until then, I'm afraid that I won't be shelling out $19.95 anytime soon for the Blackberry version of Agendus.

As always, your mileage may vary. And on that point, it might be mine that is varying right now - if I am wrong and you want to show me how to get Agendus to be the default app, I would be happy to listen.

As an aside, I did send an e-mail to Agendus (through their website, the only way to do it) on the 18th of October, asking if there was a cross-platform discount on Agendus. I received a confirmation ticket and everything. I haven't received a response - which I have found unfortunately to be somewhat typical of Agendus. They respond well in their own forums during beta testing, but poorly afterwards. I will also keep you updated about any information I get from them regarding the cross-platform licencing.

All photographs were shamelessly linked from the Iambic website, and are © the fine folks at Iambic. They are linked to totally without their permission.