Sidekick 98

There are two central problems with many modern personal information managers (PIMs) - they can be overly complex for most everyday users and, where organising contact data is concerned, their databases are often too structured. Sidekick has been popular precisely because it performs well in both these areas and it's always been relatively easy to master. This has helped it capture and retain a healthy market share in the face of the likes of Outlook and other office suite-based PIMs.

These basic principles, which have held Sidekick's place in the PIM panoply, are intact in this new version and benefit from a range of useful tweaks. There are still some niggles and annoyances, but these are countered by two major enhancements: one on the Internet side of things, and the other relating to connectivity with PDAs.

The three central elements at the heart of Sidekick 98 are the contact manager, calendar and to-do list. These have all been enhanced to some extent. The contact manager is really a collection of different Cardfiles which you can configure with any combination of fields, letting you maintain details of your CD collection as easily as your business contacts. You switch between open Cardfiles using a tabbed menu at the bottom of the screen.

The Cardfile is improved greatly thanks to the ability to insert carriage returns in fields. This makes it possible to configure one record with general contact information for an organisation, identify a single field as 'contacts' and arrange individuals' names, phone numbers, email addresses and responsibilities ready for easy-on-the-eye visual scanning.

The to-do list, referred to in Sidekick 98 as Activities, now benefits greatly from a division into sub-groupings, so appointments, to-dos, calls and Internet events are listed separately. It would have been nice to be able to create your own sub-groupings here. The events in Activities link automatically to the third standard PIM element, the Calendar, where appointments and other scheduled events, to-dos and calls can be shown in separate windows. If you opt for the weekly, monthly or yearly Calendar views you can also see colour-coded strips which show blocks of time allocated to multiday events. There are 16 colours available in all, which should be enough to meet most needs.

Despite the generally encouraging developments in Sidekick 98 there are still some annoying oversights, often due to inconsistencies within the interface. The Calendar view has the most irritating examples. You can't drag appointments to lengthen or shorten them, although you can drag them to a new time on the same day. Double-clicking in the Calendar view lets you add a new appointment, but you can't double-click in the calls or to-dos windows to achieve the same result. When viewing phone calls and to-dos in the Calendar view you can see either due date, priority or various other criteria, but not everything, which would be perfectly feasible on a high-resolution monitor.

The Internet is never far from any professional's mind these days, and a range of Web publishing and email capabilities have been added to Sidekick 98 in a bid to open this area to its users. You can go straight to a Web page by dragging its URL into your Web browser, although this will only find on-line pages, not locally cached ones.

There are several email-related innovations. At the most basic, Sidekick 98 lets you email individual contact details to third parties, and can import vCards via drag and drop. Memos written in a special area of Sidekick 98 can be linked directly to your email application for sending - a feature probably more useful for intranets than the Internet.