Written by Nowire on Wednesday, November 8, 2006

AGENDA ONE: It’s The One …

"From the moment you launch Agenda One, you’ll see why it’s different. Powerful yet unbelievably easy to use.

It’s everything you need for keeping up with your busy life when you’re on the go.

It just works. For business, family, personal use, and everywhere in between, Agenda One delivers.”

With an introduction like that, it is apparent that Developer One® is confident about their new product, and from what I can see that confidence is well-founded.

This week, Developer One® introduced this much anticipated application for Windows® Mobile smartphone. Agenda One is in line with the tradition of Developer One’s well polished applications that includes Agenda Fusion and Code Wallet. Agenda One seems to fit right in with this tradition.

Read on for more on this impressive new Smartphone application …

Compatibility/System requirements:

System requirements for AgendaOne are pretty standard. Windows Mobile 5 Smartphone (non-touch screen). Synchronizes via ActiveSync / Outlook / Exchange. The program takes up about 1.2MB of storage.

I downloaded the 14-day trial, and installed the program on my T-Mo Dash without any problem. Like most PIM programs, it is recommended that the program be installed to the main memory.

Installation:

Installation is straightforward and can be accomplished either by active sync or with a CAB file. After the installation, it will prompt you if you want Agenda One to be your default PIM (including task and contacts). That’s about it for installation; it is recommended that you “reboot” your device.

Interface/Navigation:

I have always been a Pocket PC user, and just recently switched to Smartphone with my purchase of the T-Mobile Dash. So reviewing an application from a big name developer on my first taste of “no touch” screen App is no easy task.

The interface is what we have come to expect from a publisher like Developer One. It’s clean, well organized and very intuitive. You install it, forget about it and get productive right away. If you’re familiar with Agenda Fusion, then you’ll love this program. You trigger the program in several ways, and the most obvious is of course by launching the calendar or appointment (unless of course you choose not to make Agenda One the default). If for any reason you did choose not to make Agenda One as your default PIM, you can start the program by manually going to start and launching the program.

If you’re the type of person that loves to personalize your application to suit your taste, then you will be very happy with Agenda One. It comes with a plethora of options that you can customize at will. Literally everything that you can think of is configurable with this program.

Mobile Time Management

The heart of every Mobile PIM is the calendar and synchronization with your laptop or desktop. This is where everything happens. Agenda One offers the standard views for Today, Agenda, Week, Month, Task and Search. The difference is in the way you navigate. The “use view picker” (see figure 1.) is something that I really love. It’s a graphical representation of each view, which you can use to navigate to go to your desired view. It took me a second to find out how useful this feature is, and you can do this easily with one hand. Of course if you decide that you’d rather use the standard menu driven navigation, you can do so by disabling this feature.

figure 1: view picker in Agenda one

figure 2: Week view

The month view can be viewed in full screen (figure 3.) or if you prefer to have a preview on the side (figure 4.). There are is also different levels of detail that you can choose to go in the calendar at one time. The preview is good if you want to see a summarized version of your appointments, and since every single aspect of the calendar is customizable, it’s really easy to personalize it to fit your taste.

figure 3: Month view without preview

figure 4: Month view with preview

With each view, there is an option that you can change and customize to your liking.

Entering an appointment is also a breeze with Agenda One. There is a feature called the appointment and task editors which lets you create a new task or appointment in seconds using only the navigation pad. This is very useful when you’re on the go, or you have that double latte in your other hand.

You can enter your appointments on all the calendar views using the soft-key menu. The same applies with entering tasks and doing searches. Agenda One is also seamlessly integrated with your contacts. The nice thing about this one is that it also can show photo contacts that you might have. It is arranged side by side on my device, and it’s quite nice at first. I say at first because, the picture actually doesn’t line up with the contact name. I’m pretty sure you can tell whose picture belongs to whose name, but it would’ve worked out better if the picture actually matched up with the names. So this becomes quite confusing very quickly. Definitely not a deal breaker for me since you can easily disable this feature in the option menu.

You can also update Agenda One right on your device. Since I have the trial version, I really didn’t get the chance to try this particular feature, since it’s only available with the full version.

More Options

One other neat feature of this program is the theme builder. Did I mention that this program is packed with customizable options? Anyway, if you missed that let me just mention it again, this app lets you customize till the cows come home. Case in point is the program called Theme builder. It’s a free download from the Developer One website. It’s a simple way to create your own theme to be used with Agenda One. I didn’t really get the chance to create my own theme using the generator, but from what I can see it’s very simple and you will be generating your own theme in no time.

Conclusion

If you own a smartphone, and looking for the best PIM alternative to replace the built-in calendar, then Agenda One is your answer bar none. It’s one of the best, if not the best PIM that I ever tried.

Agenda One is not perfect, but it comes close. Very close. Developer One should be proud of what they have achieved here. With all the features, and extras packed into this program, you would think it’s Christmas morning. Concerned about speed with this many features? Forget about it. Agenda One is very snappy and very responsive. Developer One, has set the bar so high on this one, it’ll be tough to even match it. We definitely have a winner here.

Side note: While doing the review, I encountered some very minor quirks that I thought was a concern. I did cover it on my review, but before we can even publish the review Developer one had already issued a new version that fixes all of those concerns. The latest version is Ver. 1.0 (build 3139) and can be downloaded from Developer One website.

Pros