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A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log The newest online consumers -- kids   T A B L E__T A L K What's the dream operating system for cruising the Internet? It's another Mac vs. Windows go-round in the 21st area of Table Talk   Search for technology books, software and more at barnesandnoble.com Search by:  Keyword Title Author     ____________________ Technology news from Microsoft, DOJ open to settlement ____________________   R E C E N T L Y Coming soon to computer games -- advertising By Janelle Brown Before you splatter that alien, a word from our sponsor! (03/19/99) Silicon Follies By Thomas Scoville Chapter 3: Hacked in Seattle (03/18/99) A Vincent Foster for Usenet liberals? By Andrew Leonard The mysterious death of an online debater sparks a flurry of suspicions and theories (03/19/99) Silicon Follies By Thomas Scoville Chapter 1: Adrift among the cubicles Chapter 2: The disinhibition of market leaders (03/18/99) Tipping the antitrust scales By Andrew Leonard How the right helped make the federal courts safe for Microsoft (03/17/99) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - -

FROM AGENDA TO ZOOT | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - This list is not intended as a guide to traditional, Packrat-like PIMs like Lotus Organizer, Outlook and Ascend (now the Franklin Planner) -- programs for keeping track of addresses, appointments and simple notes. Nor is it a list of business-contact management software, of which there is a plethora -- including Consultant, Act!, Goldmine, Commence, SharkWare, Maximizer, ContactPlus and Time & Chaos. These are more unusual, idiosyncratic products that offer a variety of approaches to organizing free-form information, sometimes in loose structures, sometimes in more well-defined outlines. Nearly all are available for demo or download from the sites below. Ecco remains my personal favorite in this class -- it's got a good calendar and address book, but the superb outliner is where it really shines. Netmanage has discontinued Ecco, but there have been sporadic efforts to purchase it and revive it as a commercial product. Info Select is another leader in this category with a long heritage; it uses a free-form database rather than outlines for storage of random information bits. InfoGenie from Casady & Greene is similar to Info Select, for Mac users. Vault is a shareware program that parallels some of Info Select's features. Zoot, shareware from Zoot Software in Vermont, lets you build libraries of related notes into easily searchable databases, and contains some cool automation features that sort information you've grabbed from the Web or other sources. AskSam is a venerable free-form database that lets you dump in all sorts of information and then search it quickly. One strength is an ability to handle a wide range of proprietary file formats. Lifestreams isn't yet available, but is worth mentioning in this roundup: Inspired by the work of David Gelernter, Lifestreams organizes and filters "streams" of documents using time as the central principle. Right now Mirrorworlds, the company behind Lifestreams, seems to be positioning its first product, now being beta-tested as Lifestreams Office, as a workgroup management tool. Userland Frontier is the brainchild of Dave Winer, who created one of the pioneering outliner programs in the 1980s, ThinkTank, which evolved into Symantec's now defunct More. Though Frontier is primarily a content management tool for Web developers, it's built around a powerful outlining concept that can be used for many purposes. Brainforest, from Aportis, is a free-form outliner for PC, Mac and PalmPilot use. Inspiration is a "visual thinking and learning tool" for concept mapping and brainstorming, if you prefer flowcharts to outlines. Lotus Agenda, the granddaddy of the free-form PIM, is still available for download, though the creaky DOS program may be more of an inspiration at this point than a usable product. The Brain, from Natrificial, is probably the snazziest-looking product here, and received the most e-mail recommendations -- many along the lines of "this may not be that useful, but it's so cool you must check it out." The Brain -- which lets you organize notes and information in pulsating star chartlike maps that rearrange themselves at your every click -- is indeed cool, and a lot of fun to play with. For me, its promise to "work the way you think" remains unfulfilled; but for those who find outliners too darn linear, it could be just the thing. Is the quest for good personal information management just a form of digital navel-gazing, as my "get-a-life" correspondents imply? I don't think so. Several readers pointed out that the medium via which you are now reading these words was itself the byproduct of one scientist's quest for a better personal-information scheme. If you read the original 1989 proposal for the World Wide Web from Tim Berners-Lee of CERN, you'll find his account of an early predecessor named Enquire: "It allowed one to store snippets of information, and to link related pieces together in any way. To find information, one progressed via the links from one sheet to another, rather like in the old computer game 'Adventure.' I used this for my personal record of people and [software] modules." That's often the way progress happens in software: A programmer solves a personal problem, and then finds that the solution has wider applications. And so a couple of readers pointed me toward a proposal by Jamie Zawinski, Netscape's programming guru, for a kind of super e-mail organizer called "Intertwingle." Zawinski, who now heads up Netscape's open-source software project, Mozilla.org, calls it a hypothetical, "blue sky" project. But a lot of great software began that way. Programmers in the free software/open source world are used to tweaking their computing environment until it perfectly suits their needs -- a few wrote in to tell me they don't need PIMs at all because they've transformed the all-purpose Unix text editor called Emacs into a personalized digital servant. If these programmers turn their energy from building operating systems and software languages to building applications like "Intertwingle" intended for the general user, the roster of PIMs I've begun to assemble here could grow a lot fuller and richer. SALON | March 23, 1999 - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - E-mail Scott Rosenberg about your favorite PIM software.