CompuNotes - We now have forums on the website! See below! Notes from The Cutting Edge of Personal Computing ISSN: 1525-4534 January 18, 2002 Issue 171 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= To subscribe, send an e-mail to compunotes-subscribe@topica.com To unsubscribe, send an e-mail to compunotes-unsubscribe@topica.com or send an e-mail to listserv@peach.ease.lsoft.com with the following SIGNOFF COMPUNOTES-L +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= CONTENTS 1=> Reminder about changes to CompuNotes ... By Patrick Grote, mailto:pgrote@compunotes.com 2=> This Issue's Winner! Articles: 3=> Ten New Year's Resolutions for your PC - Part Two, By Patrick Grote, mailto:pgrote@compunotes.com 4=> Interview with Seth Heine of CollectiveGood, By Patrick Grote, mailto:pgrote@compunotes.com Reviews: 5=> Product: Milestones Professional 2002, Reviewed By: Howard Carson mailto:agitater@compunotes.com 6=> Product: Homepage Usability - 50 Websites Deconstructed, Reviewed By: Melissa Grote, mailto:mgrote@compunotes.com 7=> Product: ToDoPLUS v3.51 (utility), Reviewed By: Howard Carson, mailto:howardcarson@home.com --- Why not suggest CompuNotes to a friend, family member or co-worker? You can win $10,000 and they have a chance to win each week with great information! Please click: http://www.recommend-it.com/l.z.e?s=864865 --- 1=> Reminder about CompuNotes' Changes, By Patrick Grote, pgrote@compunotes.com Just wanted to touch on a few things that have changed concerning CompuNotes in the year 2002: 1) You can help us grow! Forward a copy of CompuNotes to a friend that you think would like to read it. Put up a link to CompuNotes on your website. Mention articles you read in CompuNotes in online discussions. We appreciate each and every time you refer someone to CompuNotes. We wouldn't be here without a fantastic subscriber base! You can also click on the Recommend It link: http://www.recommend-it.com/l.z.e?s=864865 If you use the link you get a chance to win $10,000. 2) Advertising free. Except for CompuNotes promos, the newsletter is now advertising free. The website is also advertising free except for products or services that we personally use. We don't make any money off the banners or links you click on. The only exception to this is the Amazon link. If you like a review and want to buy a book through Amazon you can use the link. We get a few cents from each book bought through us. The money we make goes towards paying for some of the hosting and postage costs we incur. 3) We advertise for you. If you have a great website that will honestly help our readers, let us know. We'd love to include your banner on our site at no cost. 4) Contribute Your Knowledge or Opinion - We're always looking for new writers to review products and author great articles for our readers. Writing experience is not necessary and it's a great way to interact. 2=> Winner! This week's winner: Bobby Griggs! Congrats to Lynn Steffen last week's winner. Lynn doesn't have any immediate plans to use the gift certificate. Lynn says, "I really like CompuNotes! I read the whole news letter from top to bottom. The articles are good and I really enjoy the reviews. Looking forward to the next one!" Would you like to win something just for subscribing? We give away a prize each and every week to one of our subscribers. Who knows, it could be you! You could win next week ... all you have to do is subscribe! 3=> Ten New Year's Resolutions for your PC - Part Two, By Patrick Grote, mailto:pgrote@compunotes.com Last issue we talked about a few things you should do for the new year when it comes to PC maintenance. This week we'll close out our topics by talking about killing spam, removing spyware, updating your drivers and showing you a few web sites that you might use daily. SPAM EVERYWHERE It is extremely hard to avoid spam these days. Every time you check for e-mail there's a deluge of offers to make money fast, spy on someone or visit the latest porno site. Spam not only frustrates us, but also makes the chore of keeping our e-mail boxes clean harder. There are two ways of dealing with spam. For those of you who are new to the Internet you have the opportunity to save yourself from a ton of time. Whatever you do never use your primary e-mail address for the following: 1) Posting a new article on Usenet: This is where spammers live and grow. They harvest the posts that come across all the groups from alt.fan.artbell to comp.sci.programming. 2) Posting a comment on a popular message board: Message boards like the one on CompuNotes (http://www.compunotes.com/forums.htm) or Slashdot (http://www.slashdot.org). Spammers canvass the boards and will pull your e-mail address. If you want to do these things, using an e-mail address as a contact point, it makes sense to open a free Web based e-mail address. You can sign up for free e-mail at the following sites: http://mail.yahoo.com http://mail.lycos.com http://www.hotmail.com After you receive your free e-mail address, use it exclusively to post to newsgroups and message boards. One additional bonus of the free e-mail services is that they scan incoming messages for spam. The filters works remarkably well and you can control how they work. If your e-mail address has already found its way to the spammer's database we're sorry. but there are still a few things you can do to alleviate some of the spam. Use software that filters your e-mail before it hits your mailbox. Spam Buster from Contact Plus Corporation (http://www.contactplus.com/products/spam/index.htm) is very effective. It has a list of 17,000 spammer e-mail addresses and uses filters to determine the size and subject of the e-mails. Spam Buster sits in your System Tray and goes out to your mailbox at your ISP and cleans your software before downloading it. You have so much control you can cut down your spam to almost nothing. The software costs $19.95, but you can download a 'free', ad supported version. Once spam has reached the mailbox on your PC, use internal tools to delete the offending items. Outlook, Eudora and other mail programs have built in filters which can mark and delete spam. You don't have to settle for simple deletion of the spam. You can retaliate. Spam Punisher (http://biosolutions.hypermart.net/) is a free program that dissects a spam message and generates complaint e-mails to the spam sender's ISP. This is a great tool for ensuring that your complaint is lodged. A simple cut and paste of the spam into Spam Punisher does the trick. SPYWARE ... THE SPY IS AMONG US What would you think if your every click on the Internet was tracked? How about if someone knew every site you visited and how much time you spent online? Would you believe that this might be happening to you right now? The software that tracks this is called spyware and it gets on your PC by using certain software programs or visiting certain Web sites called Carriers. Typically the carrier will warn you before installing spyware, but if you don't read everything during the install (including the software licensing agreement!) you won't notice it. The insidious thing about spyware is that it works in stealth mode. You won't see anything in the System Tray and sometimes even if you look at the running programs in Task Manager it doesn't appear. How can you tell if you have spyware on your machine? Grab the program AD-Aware (http://www.lavasoftusa.com/). It's a free download and it will tell you which spyware is installed and how to remove it. There is a pay version that protects your system against spyware installs. DRIVING PROPERLY When you add a sound card, video card, CD writer or any other device to your PC, you'll need drivers. Drivers are the software programs that tell your computer how to access the device. The Windows family of operating systems (OS) come with a base set of drivers, but within 12 months of any OS release, the drivers are mostly out of date. It's a good idea to do an annual review of your drivers to ensure you have the latest versions by visiting the technical support pages at each manufacturer's Web site. You can also use a couple of Web sites which identify outdated drivers. Both cNet's CatchUp (http://catchup.cnet.com/) and PC Pit Stop (http://www.pcpitstop.com/) will scan your system and determine which software and drivers are out of date. A link is provided to update your drivers. It doesn't get any easier! If you prefer to manually search for driver updates, a couple of good resources are ZDnet's Driver List (http://www.zdnet.com/downloads/drivers.html) and DriverZone (http://www.driverzone.com/). DAILY HITS FOR THE OLD BROWSER There are a couple of sites which have become indispensable to many PC users. Bookmark these in your Favorites - they're terrific. CompuNotes - Honest reviews written by normal people. http://www.compunotes.com cNet's Computer News - Great news for computer users. http://www.news.com/ Geeknews - Offbeat technical news. http://www.geeknews.net/ No Nags Software - Excellent site for new freeware. http://www.tusafe.com/nonags/index.html Reference Desk - All the reference tools you could ever need. http://www.refdesk.com/ Enjoy the year 2002 and make it worth every second! We'll see you throughout the year! If you have ideas you think are important, click this link to stop by our forums and let us know: http://www.compunotes.com/phpBB/viewforum.php?forum=2&0 4=> Interview with Seth Heine of CollectiveGood, By Patrick Grote, mailto:pgrote@compunotes.com CollectiveGood is an organization committed to recycling older cell phones for the benefit of communities that need them. We came across CollectiveGood at Comdex this year where they won a Best of Comdex Finalist award. The person manning the booth was Seth Heine and his enthusiasm and vision of what can be was incredible. We asked Seth to participate in a CompuNotes interview and he agreed. CN:What is the goal of Collective Good? SH CollectiveGood was started in May of 2000 to redirect mobile phones that are currently being thrown in the trash into a far more useful second life as a first-time phones for low-income people in the developing world, usually in Latin America. "One man's trash is another man's treasure" sums it up pretty well; the majority of new mobile phones sold in North America are actually replacement phones, creating a pile of 40-50 million phones that are thrown into landfills every year, and that pile grows by more than a million phones every week. This "pile" of discarded phones is growing rapidly, fueled by an ever larger number of mobile phone users, and accelerating replacement rates. Since about 85% of the population in Latin America is poor, and they have never had access to telephones (landline), the continent is going to leapfrog the standard wired telephone and will go wireless. That's great, except that when people buy wireless service, the phone is sold at full price, not subsidized like we are used to in the US. That means that these phones cost $150-200, and that is very far out of reach from the 375 million people in that region that we are targeting. We hope to motivate people to recycle their spare, shelved or otherwise unused phones back into re-use through our programs so we can in turn provide these phones at a low cost to people down there who can join the modern age of communications. The underlying theme is that access to wireless communications improves people's efficiency and ability to be in touch with family, work, etc - thus improving the quality of life and economies throughout the region. Instead of spending hours on a bus or walking down a path to the next village in order to find out what a farmer needs to bring to market, he can just make a phone call and get the answer in a minute. They say "time is money", and ironically, low-income people's time is very important to them, because many of them live a hand to mouth existence, they can't afford to waste time, they need to scramble to feed their families every day. It's also important because mobile phones contain several toxic materials such as lead, mercury, cadmium, gallium arsenide and more. When you think about the fact that there are already about 200 million of these devices in our landfills, and it grows by 40-50 million phones a year with no end in sight, that's a serious environmental problem that can be averted. We recycle all phones and accessories we receive either by putting it into reuse, or making sure that is ground up and recycled for its core elements, so nothing poisonous ends up in the landfills. We are proud to be supported by the EPA and by the electronics industry association. We developed our unique model of partnerships with charities because we realize that it is an inconvenience to dig that phone out a drawer, to pack it, and to mail it in. The belief that by providing people a wide variety of charitable causes to support through their donation, we can reach a large body of mobile phone owners who are willing to take a few minutes to help a series of good causes with minimal effort. By donating your phone through CollectiveGood to one of our charity partners, you are converting that spare mobile phone into funds that these charities can use to further their missions, so in essence, you convert your old phone into protected rainforest land, children's medical assistance, international aid and disaster relief etc. We then get the phone back into re-use in the developing world at about 25% of the price of a new phone, helping people enjoy the advantages of modern telecommunications. CN: Where did the idea of recycling phones originate? SH: I came up with the idea after visiting Latin America and realizing how cumbersome simple things can be when you can't access people via telephone. The simplest tasks all of a sudden become very time consuming and inefficient. Imagine if 85% of all of the phones in this country stopped working. Think of the how that would impede everyone's ability to get things done. That's the every day reality down there, and it doesn't need to be like that. I realized that new phones were priced way out of the reach of the vast majority of the population, and that despite the fact that wireless technology can leapfrog landline/copper technology, the cost of the phone itself is insurmountable for hundreds of millions of people. I thought about the spare mobile phone in my drawer at home, and thought about how it could help someone if I could get it into the right hands. From there, I did some research, and blown away by the scale and scope of the problem, and the staggering number of phones we just throw away in North America because we don't know of a better thing to do with them. Its odd that most people keep their old mobile phones in a drawer, because they sense some value in them, but they eventually throw them away, because what else are you going to do with it? This is the perfect solution - it allows you to recapture the value via a tax-deduction as an in-kind gift to a charity, and serves the higher purposes of helping charities and helping people in Latin America. That's a lot of good for a small amount of effort. CN: What do you do with the phones you recycle? SH: All of the phones we receive are either refurbished and put into reuse, used for parts (if it is broken), or recycled for its core elements such as the plastics, metals etc. We do this for phones, batteries and accessories. The vast majority of our phones go into reuse in Latin America, and most of them work when we receive them, so its a matter of managing the refurbishment and distribution processes in order to make sure that we make the most out of every donation. CN: What is the process for recycling? Who does the recycling for you? SH: Most of the phones and accessories we receive are in working order, so we recycle them back into reuse, which is the highest form of recycling. If the phone is broken, but has useful parts, we cannibalize it, and create working phones from the scraps. Otherwise, we send the phones and batteries to partners who are EPA certified to properly dispose of these materials in a way that is not harmful to the environment. Its an important part of our corporate mission and who we are. We are proud of the fact that e do not have a dumpster at out facility, because all of the toxic materials and scrap are sent to companies who specialize in the proper disposal of these materials. CN: What is one of the more interesting success stories to come out of Collective Good? SH: We have lots of success stories, because we help many charities do more good deeds every day by providing them this innovative source of funding. We have raised tens of thousands of dollars for our charity partners and for a wide variety of causes, and provided thousands of phones to the masses in Latin America too. Unfortunately, we are disconnected from the end purchaser in Latin America because we would have to own stores down there, and that isn't feasible, so I don't have specific stories of how our phones have improved people's lives, but I do know of many stories where people who could finally afford a mobile phone were able to start their own businesses and provide jobs for others simply because they were able to be so much more efficient in responding to people's needs instantly via phone. CN: What is one of the more interesting donation stories? SH: One of the more recent stories that I find interesting is the fact that we are receiving phones from people in Europe now. We also have people interested in working with us to start this program in Europe because they face the very same issues, with even more phones going into landfills, and a stronger need to preserve the environment due to the population density over there. I recently started providing these phones to charitable organizations and relief workers in Africa (European GSM phones will not work in Latin America). The idea was always international in scope, but it went global very quickly because it is a huge problem all over the world. CN: Who makes Collective Good happen? Is it just you? SH: I'm the founder and president of the company, but there are many people who make this work. We have employees, volunteers, thousands of donors, and many charities who put work into this program to make it work every day. CN: What about Seth? What is your experience in the industry and why did you decide to get involved? SH: I got into the wireless industry after grad school by working for a software company that was planning to offer products to wireless carriers. I soon realized the the company had some good ideas, but the product itself was basically "vaporware". When I saw this opportunity to do something so much more purposeful, I jumped at it. CN: Do you think wireless phones will one day replace land lines in homes? What about the future of wireless in general? SH: I don't think that wireless phones will fully replace landline phones in homes, because cordless phones basically offer the same advantages, at a lower cost. But I know several people who only own a mobile phone, and have no landline phones in their homes. I do see an huge future for wireless products in homes, in the workplace, and everywhere else, because mobility and the opportunity to not have wires all over the place have obvious appeal. I think that most wired IT products will eventually become wireless, and think it will be fascinating to see how the ability to be mobile yet plugged in will impact society. CN: How does a person donate their old cell phone? SH: The primary way people participate in our programs is via our web page www.collectivegood.com It is designed to help people learn more mobile phone recycling, and how we do it. It makes it very easy for people to select a charity for the donation of their phone, and provides all of the donation forms. Some programs even offer free, downloadable US postal service shipping labels, so all you have to do is print the forms and walk to your mailbox. We try to make recycling your spare mobile as easy as possible, and its always free. 5=> Product: Milestones Professional 2002 Reviewed By: Howard Carson mailto:agitater@compunotes.com Requires: Windows 95, 98. 98SE, NT4, Windows 2000, XP MSRP: US$229.00 (electronic upgrade $79) The original idea for KIDASA's Milestones software came while founder Susan Butler worked at Lockheed's Austin Division. She spent more than one late evening helping highly-paid engineers put together their presentation-ready milestone charts for their next-day briefings. Since project management software of the day didn't offer the presentation qualities required, engineers and manager resorted to using CAD software, graphic designers and PC-based drawing packages. Tedious and extremely time-consuming. Big deal. Who cares. Everybody works hard, right? Wrong. Multi-national companies such as JD Edwards (specialists in project management solutions) have grown to massive proportions over the past 20 years in particular because assembling the details of a project while keeping your eye on the big picture is much like putting together a complex jigsaw puzzle. You need a guide to know how those pieces should fit together in this day and age of extreme project costs and risks. A missing piece or detail spells disaster. Even for the smallest set of details for the smallest project, some sort of planning and tracking is needed. Small companies become bigger and more successful in part because of good project management. Enter Milestones Professional 2002. We installed and tested Milestones Professional 2002 on three computers including an older PII/350 MHz with 32MB of RAM running Windows 95, a 700MHz AMD Athlon with 96MB of RAM running Windows 98SE, and a PIII/550 with 352MB of RAM running Windows 2000 Professional. Milestones installed perfectly and ran quite well on all three machines, with no apparent differences in speed of operation while using Milestones. The test projects we used were duplications of a) an existing 8 month software development project, and b) an existing, fairly large demolition and construction project. Both original project schedules had been created in Microsoft Project 98 and 2000. They were imported into Milestones Professional 2002 using its conversion wizard. We encountered only minor issues resulting from the manner in which Milestones condenses MS Project layouts and data. The time required to completely convert and check both projects amounted to a total of only 90 minutes. Kidasa Software has been beavering away to produce a large number of improvements and enhancements which make Milestones Professional 2002 quite distinct from previous versions: outline task color shading (in addition to a lot more color control in every other area), dozens more presentation options, smart status indicators which can be customized in each area of any project, a lot more value categories per graph (up to 8 value sets per graph), up to 20 outline levels, and dozens and dozens of new and updated templates. Users will find joy in the presentation-ready schedule maker, the ability to share schedules using a freely distributable viewer, generation of Internet-ready web pages, project cost tracking, new indicators for easy reporting, the ability to add schedules to PowerPoint and Word, and the ability to create charts from Project which can be updated when your Project plan changes. Nice - but is Milestones Professional 2002 a worthy alternative to Microsoft Project 2000 or 2002? We say yes, for most typical applications and for most small to large size projects. The only downside we've ever encountered is some hesitation on the part of people who fear Milestones Professional may not meet a reasonable standard. That fear is a tribute to the fact that Microsoft has done a pre-eminently superb job of making MS Project ubiquitous. Personally speaking, Milestones Pro has always been more stable and easier to use than MS Project. Cons: Milestones Professional can't do task risk or project risk analysis. Note that while Microsoft Project 2002 does risk analysis, it's not particularly complex. For that you really need one of the many (expensive) risk analysis programs currently available. We recommend using good project management software as a powerful guide however, not a final risk decision maker. In all project management, common sense and informed judgments should rule. Always. Pros: We really like the smart status indicators. You can set them to automatically update and show the current percentage completed for any task - excellent for quick or at-a-glance reviews. The MS Project to Milestones Pro conversion wizard works well. Resource tracking is now more robust - certainly up to MS Project standards - and as is typical of Kidasa products, easier to use. Milestones Professional 2002 is highly recommended for hands-on managers and planners who want to plan, create, manage, track and assess projects of any size. ADDENDUM: Project management through best practices (or at least a vague swipe at best practices) along with decent PM software, continues to command a lot of corporate and small business interest. There are good reasons for all the interest. Herewith, a few tasty links to some comprehensive project management resources. PM links resources: http://www.infogoal.com/pmc/pmcswr.htm PM research & information links: http://internet.ggu.edu/university_library/proman.html Project Mgmt Institute: http://www.pmi.org/ FatBrain's PM resource center: http://www1.fatbrain.com/fbt/offers/projectmanagement.asp KIDASA Software, Inc. Milestones Professional 2002 Product Web site: http://www.kidasa.com/information/products/professional.html 6=> Product: Homepage Usability - 50 Websites Deconstructed Reviewed By: Melissa Grote, mailto:mgrote@compunotes.com Authored By: Jakob Nielsen & Marie Tahir Publisher: New Riders MSRP: $39.99 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Buy Homepage Usability 0 50 Websites Deconstructed at Amazon.Com Now and Support CompuNotes! Amazon.Com - about $27.99 -- Click Here: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/073571102X/compunotes ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ I remember back in college I took a class that exposed us to many different websites and how they might be effective for our chosen professions. We actually had time to delve into websites that we've heard might be useful, and after checking the link out we would judge for ourselves if the site had information worthwhile enough to bookmark. Boy, was that fun! Since college, I haven't fully explored that many websites until I browsed through the book, Homepage Usability, 50 Websites Deconstructed. Quite frankly, I haven't had the time. That is one of the wonderful features of this book. You actually get to learn about the website without ever dialing in and waiting for the page to load! With this book you get to explore 50 homepages along with an inkling of the information contained within the site. Ironically, this book Homepage Usability, 50 Websites Deconstructed, written by Jakob Nielsen & Marie Tahir, was not written with the intent of flooding the reader with bookmarks. Instead, the focus is on the looking at 50 popular homepages and analyzing how ‘user-friendly’ they are. By dissecting 50 homepages with heavy traffic, the authors give tons of great examples that show how to create a home page that people will want to come back to. The book begins by looking at general guidelines for creating a winning homepage. Just by reading through this section web designers will get practical suggestions for how to make sure their efforts are worthwhile. The next section gives a bunch of homepage design statistics, which may or may not impact your future design (or redesign). As designer you might want to know that it is highly recommended that you use white for your search box color and that you put your logo in the upper left corner. You may even want to heed the advice that you use only 5-15% of space on graphics. Just by looking at these recommendations you'll be able to take a lot of guesswork out of design process. The next section is what I call the real meat and bones of the book, where 50 homepages are analyzed for their design and content. Along with the purpose and key site features, Nielsen & Tahir go in great depth looking at all of the design elements of the homepage along with possible suggestions for improving the overall user-friendliness. Speaking of user-friendly, this book is tops! The book is beautifully organized & laid out with full-color pages and guide words on each page. You can easily look up a web page by the company name or the URL. There is also an appendix in back which includes some quick fingertip facts. Just hearing that the authors typically charge $10,000 to review a company’s homepage, you might quickly agree that this book is a bargain for $39.99. I think though, the biggest bargain you will receive by reading this book, is that afterwards you will have the knowledge on how to design a homepage with a winning 1st impression, and one that works. After all, you don't want users to come just once to your site, but instead frequent on a regular basis. Homepage Usability will show you how. 7=> Product: ToDoPLUS v3.51 (utility) Reviewed By: Howard Carson, mailto:howardcarson@home.com Requires: Any PDA device running Palm OS 2.0 and higher including any device with a Palm upgrade card installed. MSRP: US$19.95 Hands High Software, Inc. is one of hundreds of successful small companies which have sprung up over the past few years to make software exclusively for the Palm organizer and compatible devices from HandSpring, Sony, HandEra, IBM, TRG, Symbol and Franklin. Hands High Software began in March of 1997 with the launch of a product called Trip. In March of 1998 Hands High acquired Pilot PLUS, which added Memo PLUS and ToDo PLUS to the product line. A PDA (such as my Handspring Visor Prism) is only as good as the software running on it and only effective if it's diligently used. While there are literally thousands upon thousands of programs available for PalmOS-based PDAs right now, not all of those programs are as well integrated into the PalmOS environment as they should be. Enter ToDoPLUS. One of the most important design features of ToDoPLUS is that it uses the database of the built-in ToDo List which ships with all PalmOS-based PDAs. Any software which synchronizes the built-in ToDo List will synchronize the same information in ToDoPLUS. The only ToDoPLUS data which won't synch are drawings (the standard ToDo List utility is useful but very basic and does not have any sort of drawing or item alarm capabilities). The point of this integration is that it also lets you edit items on your PC in the Palm Desktop software. ToDoPLUS has an extensive and well-integrated feature and function set. You can alarm any task, attach a drawing to any task, filter your tasks by due date filters (including Radar [past due, next 7 days and no due date combined], Today, Tomorrow, This Week, Next Week, Next 7 Days, Future, No Due Date and Past Due) and create repeating tasks. ToDoPLUS is compatible with any synchronization software that works with the built-in PalmOS ToDo List, has complete Palm III support with beaming and fonts (including font selection for PalmPilot users), a Summary screen, support for the Lefty utility (for left-handed users), alarm sound choices for PalmOS 3.0 and above, and is FontBucket (custom font selection) enabled. When you create or add a task in ToDoPLUS, it will also appear in the built-in ToDo List. In addition, ToDoPLUS data is compatible with contact managers such as Microsoft Outlook, Symantec ACT and Goldmine. Everything will synch except ToDoPLUS drawings. Using ToDoPLUS is as simple as launching it. The opening screen shows you a list of the tasks that you have created and lets you add new tasks, attach drawings, notes and sort and prioritize everything. There's a tool bar containing icons which you tap to begin a new task. Tapping an existing entry lets you edit it. Tapping the drawing icon calls a second set of tools below the drawing screen. Select a tool then tap the drawing area and drag to draw. The available tools are pencil, eraser, line, rectangle and ellipse. The line width of each tool is adjustable. If Memo PLUS is installed, also from Hands High Software, you can choose a Memo PLUS template to start a drawing. Cons: Each to-do and memo item cannot be more than 4,000 characters. To put that in perspective, this review is about 4,200 characters. Not bad, but a needless restriction since memory is not the problem it used to be. Only two notable design flaws: a) 15 category limit (I could really use a dozen more please!); b) the menu bar is not available while in Summary mode. You have to select a category first to gain access to the menu bar. In any case, Summary mode is only of limited use. Pros: Superbly useful. Being able to attach quick and simple line drawings to field notes and to-do items is fantastic. Being able to sort out your day(s) using priority settings and alarms (or not) for each item, in over a dozen different customizable categories is a true time and effort saver. I have been a registered, daily user of ToDoPLUS for about a year and I will not give it up. Highly recommended. Hand High Software ToDoPLUS v3.51 Product web site: http://www.handshigh.com/html/todoplus.html +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= Publisher / Senior Editor: Patrick Grote, mailto:pgrote@compunotes.com Senior Editor: Howard Carson, mailto:agitater@compunotes.com Managing Editor: Don Hughes, mailto:don.hughes@compunotes.com Archives: ftp://ftp.compunotes.com/archives Website: e-mail: mailto:feedback@compunotes.com Want to Write for Us?: mailto:agitater@compunotes.com fax: (314) 909-1662 voice: (314) 909-1662 +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+= CompuNotes is: Available weekly via e-mail and on-line. We cover the PC computing world with comprehensive reviews, news, hot web sites, great columns and interviews. We also give away one software package a week to a lucky winner for just reading our fine publication! Never dull, sometimes tardy, we are here to bring you the computing world the way it is! Please tell every on-line friend about us! CompuNotes B440 1114 West Essex Ave. St. Louis, MO 63122 feedback@compunotes.com (C)2002 Patrick Grote ISSN: 1525-4534 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Send FREE video emails in Yahoo! Mail! http://promo.yahoo.com/videomail/ *********************************************** The COMPUNOTES-L mailing list is powered by L-Soft's renowned LISTSERV(R) list management software together with L-Soft's LSMTP(R) mailer for lightning fast mail delivery. For more information, go to: http://www.lsoft.com/LISTSERV-powered.html