Joseph Steig: Computing

FastTrack Schedule

Fri, 28 Mar 2003 10:38:08 GMT

There's a very good, cross-platform project manager that's much cheaper and less complex than MS Project: AEC's FastTrack Schedule. I've been using the OS X version and recently I downloaded the Palm complement. It syncs perfectly with desktop files. It's the most impressive Palm software I've ever used. Pricey at $99 but I may pay the money. The product is actually easier to use on the Palm, in many respects, than on the desktop because certain ways of manipulating a GANTT chart lend themselves to pen-based computing. And the whole thing works perfectly with OS X.

Entourage not Mail.app

Tue, 17 Sep 2002 04:24:35 GMT

Here's why I'm back to Entourage as my mail ap, rather than Apple's Mail.app. First, after a mysterious, aborted sync with Entourage's new Palm snyc that seemed to destroy random contacts in my Entourage database, I ditched the thing in favor of Mail.app. Quickly I realized a few things. First, Mail.app is really slow. Much slower than Entourage. Second, e-mail formatting is a lot weaker. For those of you who type all your e-mail in lowercase, you could care less but for me, this is important. But most important: when I use Entourage, I keep the files on my laptop. When I'm working at my desktop, I firewire connect my laptop as a slave hard drive to my desktop. With Entourage I can easily use the same mail files. With Mail.app, because of where the files have to reside, in the Library folder, I couldn't figure out how to do the same thing. So, hello Entourage again. Good to be back. Oh, and I'm still using Daylight for contacts and calendar. The calendar is pretty slow but contact management is great and you can select a contact, click "send e-mail" and simply launch Entourage from Daylight. Works for me.

DayLite

Mon, 09 Sep 2002 03:06:29 GMT

I have just been saved from sneaking out to by a Win machine by software put out by Market Circle. This product, DayLite, is the first real CRM application for the Mac. For those who have used a CRM before, it does explicitly what a program like Entourage tries to do--create the relationships between calendar events, tasks, to-do's, e-mails and track projects by their different components (meetings, participants, deadlines etc.). It's invaluble if you're managing multiple projects, multiple people. We'll see how well it works . . . I'll keep you posted. The only thing it lacks is e-mail (which the love of my Windows life, Goldmine, does have). But I've decided to switch over from Entourage to OSX Mail--as I type this it's importing all my Entourage folders. All this was sparked when I used the latest version of the Palm-Entourage Conduit on my Handspring, the thing crashed and it seemed to have randomly eliminated 1/3 of my contacts. Possibly Handspring's fault because of their lack of full support of OSX, but in any case, default response is to blame MS. Now if only Market Circle can draw on the address book of OSX. Probably too much to ask.