Possible successors to Sidekick (I know we don't want to move, but...) 1

[MEdgar7863]

It's the holiday period here in the UK, and I had a bit of time to play, so I checked out a few PIM packages.

After some time since my last visit, I returned to RedBox Organizer [

http://www.inklineglobal.com/products/rbo/

], and was pleasantly surprised.
It is now up to Version 6, and is getting very similar to Sidekick in many ways.
There is now a phone dialler, expenses section, and the ability to keep a contact log.
There is also reporting, and mailmerge with Word or WordPerfect.
Import/export is restricted to delimited text, but I can see their argument that this is the most open format to start with.
There's even a world clock / daylight map.
The contact records have some fixed fields, but there is an expandable "user defined" section.
Sync with Palm and PPC are included.

The most flexible card file templates still seem to be in C-Organizer [

http://www.csoftlab.com/

], (In fact they are completely flexible), as is the folder structure for storing data.
The user interface on this one is different to Sidekick, but I quickly got used to it.
Mainly PIM functions, but they added a phone dialler link as a response to user requests, along with vCal/vCard import.
No expenses function, but the notes pages can contain tables.
Sync with Palm and PPC are optional extras.

I think third place still goes to EssentialPIM [

http://www.essentialpim.com/

].
There are elemnts of the other two here, plus the developers seem to be focussing on portability as their main selling point.
There are versions designed to run and even autorun from USB sticks, plus they're piloting a function to sync with a hosted online PIM.
They also have a pretty open folder structure for storing notes, similar to C-Organizer.
Syncs with PPC.

That said, I have tried copying RedBox and C-Organizer onto a USB stick, and both ran OK on my PC at work.
CSoftLab state that C-Organizer is designed with this in mind, but RedBox don't seem to state whether this portability is deliberate.
EssentialPIM will import and export vCal/vCard, something which appeals to me personally, both for swapping data to and from work (Lotus Notes / Outlook), and getting basic Calendar and Contacts data over to Linux (Sunbird or kOrganizer).
Of the 'big league players', I still think Lotus Organizer is effective, as is WordPerfect Mail, but they're purely PIM packages, and require third party sync software for Palm/PPC.
I've already purchased C-Organizer to carry with me, and I'm thinking of buying a copy of RedBox, if only so that I can ask them if the similarity to Sidekick is intentional! If I had support due to making a purchase, I would like to request vCal/vCard/iCal handling, as mentioned, plus the addition of mailmerge to OpenOffice/Star Office.

In each case, for transition, the starting point for calendar data has to be Sidekick, as SK only seems to be able to import vCal data.
For most members of this forum, I imagine that wouldn't be a problem. My backup data will remain in SK98 until the thing stops working completely!
Trial versions of my top 3 are available for download from the publisher's websites.

These are my choices for an alternative, but I know there are many others out there. Two I haven't explored recently are Do-Organizer and Time And Chaos, (anyone care to speak up for them?), but the main point I'd wish to make is that RedBox Organizer seems to be turning into something akin to Sidekick.

 

[jsc1]

Did you notice that Redbox Organizer hasn't been updated since April 2005. Sounds kind of dead. Not sure it's even worth the look.

Essential PIM's address book doesn't do one of the main things that I liked about Sidekick - create a totally custom database, ie, no locked in fields. My 3,600 name Sidekick file started life long before Outlook existed, and the fields don't convert very well. All these other databases also take this 3,600 name file that's only 1.6meg in Sidekick and create a 15meg file for some reason (all those fixed fields?).

I'll have to look at C-Organizer again, but the last time I did, it choked on my file, and was slower than mud for some reason (maybe it had to create an index after import?). Still didn't have the flexible fields that I wanted.

It is frustrating, isn't it!

 

[Frank10]

MEdgar, great reviews! Many months ago I'd posted about C-Organizer (before the latest revision, then a brief note after the revision), but honestly I've not gone back and really put the program through the paces after the developer did his nice update, I'd decided for the short term to "hold it in one more time" and stay with Sidekick, BUT, like you I want a modern / nicely featured successor.

C-Organizer had some very good features, the customization as you'd mentioned, and I asked the developer to add some "table view customization" (choosing columns that contacts can be sorted by), speed dialer like you mentioned, he did all the list of requests! It won't print mailing labels but you can export to Word which will do mailing labels, I suggested to the developer he just lean on Word for that and focus his work on the other vital database aspects. Seems a very good program, I need to visit it again.

Do-Organizer, "wow", those guys are simply absent... I wrote them several times asking if it was possible to SAVE custom fields (like to keep a template of a record etc), never ever got an answer using all of their addresses and sending from multiple addresses to make sure it wasn't one spam filter issue etc, never a reply. Asked the same question on their google group, never a reply (my question remains there as the last entry, like March 2006).

So they updated the program recently, I wrote AGAIN multiple times, finally got a reply, "no you can't save custom fields". Wow. So every new record you have to construct your fields, no way to save a template or replicate from a saved record. And, customer support is absolutely terrible, though their program does look "pretty".

Time and Chaos, looking at the features it looked very encouraging when I checked it out 6 months back or so, but once downloaded and working with it, it was amazingly "crippled and short featured" (seemed to me anyway) for as mature of a product as it is. For very simple address book and calendar features it is functional, but, having been used to the customization ability of Sidekick, Time and Chaos hit me as someone's part time high school project, in comparison.

Reading the features and the "promotional text", it seemed very much more capable of a program than what I found in actual attempted use, huge disappointment compared to Sidekick.

Essential Pim has advanced a lot since I tested it out last year, there were very constant bugs in the program at that time (many new revisions, still constant problems), but I'd have to think they've sorted that out by now. I remember one bug (that I hope they fixed) is how much info you can write in a field. With Sidekick, you can type a brief note in a field, you can type a paragraph or two if needed, nice little "mini-notes facility" for a field like "notes from last call" for instance; with Essential Pim you were able to set a field length for like 175 characters or something but it crashed if you actually went over 80 or so.

Hopefully that's been fixed but it's an example of problems I had back then. As well the program's focus seems to be on keeping it small and portable for USB memory drives etc, the developers wanted to avoid any features that might endanger the ease of simple portable use.

The portable would be "nice", but being used to the customizations of Sidekick, I'm hooked on some degree of database related features. Many programs do a decent job at calendar / schedule (or, dedicated to notes, for which I like TreeDBPro), but for a simple tailorable database which is rock-solid, no crashing, ease of drag and drop, ease of setting up replicatable "example database fields" etc, I just love Sidekick (though I'd absolutely love to move on in modern times with "modern" feature needs like some of the features you described!)

Maybe C-Organizer is the one, I've looked at 20 or so and it seems (for me) to show the most promise. Microsoft Outlook with the big corporate world acceptance and use of that program took much of the oxygen out of the market for PIM's... Lotus Organizer etc were great programs, they are pretty much all to drift now...

Hopefully there is enough of a market for a C-Organizer etc that somebody will continue offering and supporting a program that truly is as "good" (whatever that means to each of us) as Sidekick was / is...

Thanks MEdgar,

Frank H.

 

[Zoltan627]

Does anyone have an opinion of Anytime Organizer ? I tried C-Organizer Pro but I found it to be lacking.

I am going to throw out as a suggestion for a useful calendar Mozilla's Sunbird. It is still in its early stages (version 0.3), however I have been using it for a few days and it seems to do the job. Its biggest downside is that it does not have an interface to sync with a PDA, although according to the FAQ's that is being worked on. Until I find a better solution, I am using Sunbird as the calendar with SK98 for the address books.

 

[Frank10]

Hi Zoltan627, I downloaded and tried Anytime Organizer Deluxe 10 a while back (hoping yet again to find a decent path to move to from the "perfect comfortable old shoe" Sidekick 98), but for my needs (and all of us will vary a bit on our demand wishlist), Anytime Organizer was not flexible or powerful enough in the contact manager features compared to Sidekick 98.

The positive thing about Anytime Organizer is that it's been out there a long time and seems to have a pretty good sales volume out there (sold in office supply stores etc) so one would hope it is supported and will stay alive etc, but to me (with contact management being my main thing) it was a big step backwards from Sidekick.

Re: C-Organizer Pro, I asked the developer for some features and he included pretty much every request I had (the ability to customize "table view" columns, savable templates re: custom fields for the database, several features now in version 3.5 released spring of 2006), but for now I'm too set in with Sidekick to take on a migration right now.

Do you remember what for your needs was lacking with C-Organizer Pro, or was it the std version you'd tried? The developer is very open to suggestions, if they are "basic and needful" it seems he jumps right on it.

Best,

Frank H.

 

[Zoltan627]

It was C-Organizer Pro v 3.5, one thing that I did not like was how it displayed contacts in the address books. I found the need to specify which field would be displayed to be a pain. The other thing was (this might have been due to an idiosyncrasy of my system) the custom fields from C-Organizer's address books did not transfer over to my Palm. Or more exactly, the data would sometimes be in the correct field and sometimes in one of the default fields. There was something else, but I cannot remember what it was.

I'm like you, in that I am too tied in to Sidekick to switch. So, as I said in my earlier post, I will just use two apps to do the job.

If there is someone out there willing to write a 21st century version of sidekick, he would get rich just selling it to those of us on this board!

 

[Frank10]

Thank you for the insights there Zoltan627, and alas, you've described what I've run into so often trying to find a "transfer platform" away from Sidekick, so many programs are a bit half baked and a work in progress.

I've run into the kind of thing you've described so often, it's amazing... A company couldn't survive selling "almost" refrigerators, or "almost" drills or faucets, but software, sure enough, "almost" is often all we get...

Like you I'm using a few different apps, one foot firmly in Sidekick 98, nothing yet is as good for contacts for me (I need custom fields flexibility, drag and drop, no tiny limit of characters for data fields, bulletproof dependability, not crippled for the sake of fitting on a USB drive, not dummied down for "simple only" use... I admit it, I LOVE Sidekick 98...)

I would love to find a truly great successor, I think Outlook many years ago took the oxygen out of the room for the PIM companies, Lotus Organizer etc etc all going pretty much to the ditch...

Long Live Sidekick, LOL. (At least long live this forum, and thanks again James33 for picking up the ball after the corporate crew walked away...)

Frank H.

 

[Zoltan627]

I agree with you, Microsoft Outlook and Palm desktop killed the PIM. The one thing I have found lacking in all the other apps is what you said: custom fields, drag and drop, and the ability to have multiple address books (In SK98 I have eight different ones). I guess there isn't a perfect solution and the best is to muddle on with SK and whichever calendar that suits individual preference.

Has anyone said for sure if Sidekick will work in Vista? From what I understand about Vista, it is going to have issues with 16 bit applications. Hopefully Microsoft included a compatibility mode as they did with XP, otherwise life will get a bit more complicated.

 

[pjo1966]

Mozilla Sunbird looks interesting. Is there any way to transfer calendar data from Sidekick 98 to it?

 

[Zoltan627]

If you could figure out a way to save Sidekick 98's calendar as a csv file it would be possible. But Sidekick does not appear to support exporting to any format other than its own *.skc files. Mozilla Sunbird will import data from either csv files created by MS Outlook or iCalendar files.

On the calendar side of things I like Sunbird, it seems to do everything I want. If you decide to use Sunbird check-out the various extensions that are available for it on Mozilla's site that add to its usability.

 

[james33]

Dear Zoltan627 & Frank10, MEdgar7863 & jsc1,

Hallo and a Happy and a peaceful New Year to all.

Internet Sidekick will synchronise a previously imported Sidekick98 Calendar with a Schedule+ 7.0 *.scd or *.cal with version 1.0.
Furthermore:
See the following pages for details about importing Schedule+ files into Outlook 2003

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP052472901033.aspx

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP052472891033.aspx

Then all you have to do is find a blank schedule+ file to synchronise with....

Well it sounds like it should work so will somebody come up with a file we can delete all the information out of and then test the above to see if it all works out in practice.

Regards
Jim

 

[pjo1966]

According to these:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/198004/en-us

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/158084/en-us

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/183775/en-us

it was once possible to import Sidekick calendars into Outlook. Does anyone have an older version of Outlook to check this out?

 

[james33]

Dear Me,

As you so rightly point out that is the situation, & I am supposed to be some kind of an expert on the transfer to Outlook! I can only suggest that I was bemused by the .csv part of the previous comment and got soooo excited I dashed off the reply!
If you convert to Outlook you can subsequently save it as a .csv file anyway.

Outlook 2000 has the converter to import Sidekick files(it says for sidekick95 versions but it does sort of work with Sidekick98 calendar files if they have been opened in Internet Sidekick).
However they are not directly converted and all tasks with no enter date end up together..
There are various other problems too and as I have said repeatedly, it is not worth the effort, better to use the 2 alongside each other until the sidekick one is used up.

Regards
Jim

 

[MEdgar7863]

pjo1966, Zoltan627 et al,

It is possible to get csv data out of SK98 calendar, but it's a bit of a convoluted process, and you need to be reasonably confident with a spreadsheet.

In the Sidekick program, select Reports > Calendar from the menus.
In the dialog which opens, select a date range, and choose what type of data you want to use.
(I'd do one data type at a time).
The report page produced is, in effect, a spreadsheet table. You can drag across this with the mouse to highlight a selection of cells.
With your cells selected, select Edit > Copy from the menus.
These cells can then be pasted into a spreadsheet program.
From the spreadsheet, save the data as a csv file.

The current version of Sunbird is 0.3. It is disappointingly restricted in its handling of input data.
If you can get hold of a copy of Sunbird 0.2, I'd go for that. It has field mapping, as well as a wider range of recognized formats.
(The bugs page on the Mozilla site already has several postings complaining about this omission, but as the project is open source, I don't know if anyone will take it up as a priority).

Sunbird 0.3 expects the incoming data to be as if it has come from MS Outlook.
These fields are, in order,

"Subject","Start Date","Start Time","End Date","End Time","All day event","Reminder on/off","Reminder Date","Reminder Time","Meeting Organizer","Required Attendees","Optional Attendees","Meeting Resources","Billing Information","Categories","Description","Location","Mileage","Priority","Private","Sensitivity","Show time as"

It also needs the double quotation marks around each data field.
These will be the headings for the columns in the spreadsheet you use to make your csv file.
(You can create a master page by copying JUST the data fields list above, pasting it into a text file editor and saving it as <filename>.csv
Then open or import this file into your spreadsheet program).

Copy the columns from your Sidekick report into the relevant columns of your spreadsheet.
Note that you may have to copy the date into two columns (Start Date and End Date). The columns with no equivalent in Sidekick can be left empty.
Multi date entries in Sidekick go into the report with the date range in one field, so you will have to do a bit more editing here.
IMPORTANT NOTE - my copy of Sunbird 0.3 seems to expect the date to be in US format (mm/dd/yyyy). You will have to set this in either your spreadsheet or in SK98.
If you're a good touch typist, you may be able to just type the csv file : )

When the data is in the sheet, export it (or save as) <new_filename>.csv
This is the file to be imported into Sunbird.

It isn't quite as complicated as it looks here. If things don't work first time, check all your commas and quotation marks, then try again.
Also think whether a fundamental piece of data is missing - a calendar entry will need at least one date, but the description may be blank, for example.

Good luck!

Martin

 

[james33]

ABSOLUTELY BRILLIANT MARTIN!

It is a real leap forward and solves the problem for calendar conversions.
Regards
Jim

Take a bow!(AND A STAR)

 

[pjo1966]

I've had trouble locating Sunbird 0.2. I downloaded 0.3, but as Martin indicated, it doesn't Import. Does anyone know where I can find 0.2?

 

[Zoltan627]

I found it on Download.com.

 

[pjo1966]

OK... downloaded and installed 0.2. When I go to import my CSV file I get a message saying "No events or tasks to import from file multi day.csv"

Does anyone have an idea of what I might be doing wrong?

 

[pjo1966]

Update... all the data loaded fine into Outlook, but not into Sunbird.

 

[MEdgar7863]

pjo1966

My guess is that either your data fields do not have double quotes around them, or that just one is missing.

e.g.

"field 1","field 2","field 3"

rather than

field 1, field 2, field 3

I also found it quite easy to miss the last double quote from the end of the line. That's probably just the way I skip over the text when reading the screen...

You can usually get most of these in quickly by doing a search and replace in your text editor.