Product Reviews

Organizer 2.0 is definitely worth the two-year wait. It is a substantially enhanced upgrade, putting almost unrivalled contact management and personal organisational capabilities into a budget-priced product.

Organizer 2.0 is now a drag-and-drop delight, and a far cry from menu-based organisers. The Information views, with the chunky toolbar at the top of the screen, mean you rarely need to scour the menus; even help is accessible from mini '?' buttons.

Two other interface improvements are the ability to alter the look of windows by choosing from a range of colours and patterns rather than grey; and the Instant Organizer Extension, which provides fast access to data within Organizer 2.0 without running the whole program. But even if you keep the whole program open all the time, it will only occupy 2Mb to 3Mb of RAM.

Organizer 2.0 is based around four personal information aids: contacts, tasks, notes and appointments. The toolbar provides the first three with View and Create buttons, plus access to the Appointments calendar. The buttons also act as droplets from within the program, so you could, say, drag a contact onto the Create Appointment button to set up a meeting with that person.

The

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calendar is one of the cleanest we have seen, letting you create banners and appointments anywhere and then drag them into place. Reminders, notes and other calendar entry attachments can be viewed from a pop-up menu on that entry. You can't attach audio files to alarm-triggered items, but the reminders are pretty unmissable.

By default, the Contact view shows your contacts by name, with company, two phone numbers and a colour-coded category. Here you can see if a contact has attachments, use check-boxes for manual filtering, and re-sort the list alphabetically by clicking on any column heading.

Double-clicking on a contact opens up the Contact dialog box, which can be dragged and dropped. So, if you had already entered family birthdays in the calendar relating to that contact, you could drag the entries onto the Contact dialog box in order to add them to its pop-up attachment menu, automatically filed under a Birthdays menu.

Each group of fields in the Contact dialog box expands when clicked, providing a context-sensitive mini-dialog box of customisable fields. Each contact has four phone fields and two address blocks, as well as an Other Information section, which lets you apply a contact category and birthday, plus five user-definable fields. These custom fields are AppleScriptable, which allows you to link to external programs containing that contact's details - for example, you can fire up Claris Emailer to send the contact an email. This feature doesn't support non-Claris packages, although the Web link will activate Netscape Navigator.

Of course, this is not groupware but a single-user personal organiser, with synchronisation capabilities for using Macs and PowerBooks together. As such, Organizer 2.0 is the best yet and a joy to use.