After you talking about your socks I gave the trial a quick go. I was very pleased by some of the fresh ideas, the spin wheel, etc. It’s not there yet though, for example on the week view there needs to be the option to tap-and-hold on an individual appointment and edit it. Now you have to first select the appointment and in the next view you can choose the Edit command.

Touch scrolling doesn’t work in all views (yet). Contact view is one of the views it does work in, but there I was disappointed at that you have to double-tap VERY quickly to open it. I even had to double-tap with nail, since it wouldn’t respond to my finger. I would like to swipe my finger across the screen to scroll, and tap (or double tap, if it would work better) to open a contact and select the phone number/e-mail address I want to contact.

Settings are well balanced (generous, but not over the top), but the descriptions can be quite vague.

Again, the spin wheel is cool, and you can even pick the views that should appear in the wheel!

Project view is quite nice as well, it’s very easy to add new or existing items to it, so it doesn’t take a lot of effort to set up a project.

Recommended to try out, but it’s no PI replacement yet. Birdsoft can build from this version and certainly be a serious alternative for people who think PI is too much.

How’d the digital wallet piece of it look spm? That’s the other new spin with this one, bundling the wallet app in with the PIM apps …

It’s one of the items in the Spin Wheel, and if you want to open it, you have to enter your password. This is optional, you don’t have to secure it.

The wallet is saved as a MainWallet.xaw file in the My Documents folder though, so it syncs with ActiveSync. Also, Birdsoft has a free desktop compantion on their site – didn’t try that.

I didn’t find it intuitive to enter data (on the PPC) though!

But of course, just like SK Tools, if you work with something for a while it might start to work for you. But even then, it isn’t as advanced as eWallet. On the other hand, eWallet is a standalone application, Birdsoft included it as one of the features of Extreme Agenda so we can’t expect to have a full eWallet competitor.

Thanks spm – that’s not too good if it’s not intuitive to enter data with it …

@spmwinkel

Thanks for taking a look! I will admit here and on our site that the Week View did suffer on this first release. We will be adding selection, context menus and drag-n-drop into this and preview windows in 3.2 hopefully out by the end of the month. I thought touch scrolling was working everywhere, do you remember any places it wasnt? And just curious what you didnt find intuitive in the wallet entry?

“Recommended to try out, but it’s no PI replacement yet. Birdsoft can build from this version and certainly be a serious alternative for people who think PI is too much.”

We hope so. We think we are already there, but we will cement that in with upcoming releases! Any features of PI that you would really miss if you switched?

Thanks again!! I love to hear all feedback…

@ Birdsoft – great job for tracking online posts and discussion!

@ Finger scrolling – from the Extreme view, I press the left softkey Views > Schedule > Dates.
Here, finger scrolling does nothing. Also, dragging the scroll bar does nothing. What I mean is that I put my stylyus on the center piece of the scrollbar and drag it up/down. The bar moves, but the screen doesn’t react, and when I let go with the stylus, the bar shoots back to it’s initial position. You’re familiar with the iPhone slide to unlock, right? It’s just like dragging the arrow near to the unlock position, but letting go just before unlocking – it shoots back and nothing happened.
Pressing the scrollbar arrows or the space between the arrow and the center piece of the scrollbar, does work.

Second, in the settings finger scrolling only moves up/down as long as my finger is on the screen. If I let go my finger, scrolling stops. So here we can’t swipe on the screen so that the scrolling continues and slowly decreases speed, like in -for example- the Contacts view.

D-Pad navigation is really sweet though, and the overall layout is very good: quite clean and not unbloated!

@ Wallet – I think the name of the item should be set in the second screen – first pick the type, icon and category, and then the name of the item in the second screen. At first, I had no clue what to put here since didn’t know what was coming. Of course this is something that users could get used to after doing it once or twice, but the first time is confusing.

Suggestion for Software registration template: add Developer and Purchase date, possibly even Reseller. This allows users to specify that they purchased software from Mobihand on January 10 2008, which makes it a lot easier to see if upgrades are free or within a discount timeframe.
And of course, for PPC software we can’t do without a field for User name! Some use the device owner name, others the e-mail address, etc.

BTW – now that I’m in the Wallet, pressing Menu > Options opens the Wallet settings, but if an item is opened, Menu > Options opens the General settings! Linking this one to Wallet settings as well would be useful.

Finally, while not everyone might like to have all types of items grouped together (software registration, bank account, etc), I do like it by default. But having the ability to regroup items or move single items to another group might be cool. However, this is just me thinking for other people, so please don’t add such functionality if I’m the only one bringing this up. However, if I tap-and-hold on such grouping title (for example Bank Accounts) I see the popup menu, but the items don’t do anything. You should either disable the popup menu when doing tap-and-hold on such a grouping title, or allow users to use the items (for example: rename the grouping title or remove an entire group)

People also might like to enter the date immediately into the field, and not going to a second screen to enter data, and then returning to the previous view to select another field to edit. If people can edit items in-place, they can type, press the down arrow to go to the next field, type the data, press down again, etc.

I think this is one of the main points why I didn’t find it intuitive.

I’m not sure if there would be anything I’d miss from PI if I switched. I’m a feature-a-holic. I use software quite minimally but enjoy knowing that there are lots of features that I COULD use if I would need them in the future. So I wouldn’t use either Extreme Agenda or PI to it’s full potential.

Ahhh… Ok…

1. I realized that now if you have “Variable Height” set for Agenda Format in Schedule Settings that the Day/Dates view scrolling wont work. Ill have that fixed in next release. And no I dont have flick type scrolling where the list keeps going in there quite yet.. Still experimenting with how to do that right.

2. Wallet Name on first screen.. Yeah, I figured that that might be what you meant, I would think you get used to it, but I may move it to all 1 list now that it has been switched to list based. But after doing it once it should be more clear.

The sorting is all based on what template you used. I can probably also offer a list based view if I hear others want it.

I will change it to jump to wallet options(tiny overlook on my part, all other view works like youd expect). And Ill consider adding those fields to Software.

We will do some inline editing. We have it started and it should work good for dates/times. Some fields though it really slows down d-pad scrolling if every time an edit field needs to be brought up(as in the new PI editing).

And yeah, we have tried to cover most of the things people would miss from PI or AF, but we’re always wondering if there are a few more.

And I like PI a lot, but I think it has gotten to where too many things are in there that arent streamlined and/or that make it seem like there are more features than there really are, with a lot of settings being leftover from previous interfaces. I thought PI8 would clean that up more than it ended up doing… I can definitely follow that philosophy if it gets more sales though..