That said, though, the electronic concept of messaging is still a fledgling child in comparison, but it has advanced far more in just the last forty years than any other means of communication, possibly barring the telephone.

E-mail has its roots in the MIT Compatible Time Sharing System, which in 1961 allowed users to store files on an IBM 7094 mainframe and retrieve them from remote (dial-up slave) terminals. This allowed a simple way to manipulate data at a distance, as well as deliver communiqués with relative ease.

Progress continued on efficient means of delivering messages over intranet based systems, but the most recognizable form of e-mail finally materialized in 1971 when Ray Tomlinson designated a method for which a user name and their machine ID were separated with an ‘@’ sign on the Dept. of Defense's ARPANET system. That’s still decades before the launch of the World Wide Web, A.K.A. the modern Internet.

Even though most e-mail sent today is still just plain text, many people have switched to using HTML encoded messages to make their mail prettier. HTML based e-mail is common enough now to be largely un-noticed from a PC, as the main differences are the extra formatting and images found within the body of the message, but on a Treo HTML messages are a burden at best, and a nightmare at worst. A plain text email, just a few sentences might take up 1kb of space but if sent as HTML, it could easily be ten times that size!

Most HTML mail is completely un-viewable on a Treo. If you’ve ever received a message in VersaMail that is largely composed of garbage text with no discernable content, then you have seen what a nightmare these kinds of messages are and that they are usually unreadable, never mind the fact that most spammers love to send e-mails that are nothing BUT a graphic with a phony subject line and a forged / fake address making them difficult if not impossible to block or filter.

AGM solves this by linking to your default web browser, and upon your command, relaying the HTML mail TO the browser so that you may open and view it in all its glory, or ugliness, depending on how you look at it. With one tap of a button, Blazer opens and all of that garbled junk finally becomes clear and readable. No longer need you rush back to your office or lug around your laptop to read all of your messages.

Beyond that, AGM also has two distinct viewing modes: Compact and Expanded. Compact mode displays your messages with the sender’s name, a small snippet of the subject, which on a Treo are typically one to two letters and message date stamp. Unfortunately, this limitation makes using this mode on your Treo practically pointless, unless you only need to know who sent you a message and not what it concerns. That you cannot resize the Sender, Subject and Data partitions is rather disappointing, as it would be much more flexible if you could just drag them to make the viewable area larger like you can on most computers.

Therefore, the Expanded mode is more personable, as it displays the name of the sender, the date, the subject and a few lines of the body of each message. Whichever way you opt to go, you can scroll through your messages using the arrows and elevator, or with your handy 5-way nav pad, which is fully supported throughout AGM5.

AGM also handles SMS messaging, which can be either a boon or a bane, depending on what Treo model you have.

The major drawback with the way AGM handles your SMS messages is that it doesn't use the super-cool threaded mode that the built-in SMS messaging client on the 700p does, but rather each message is stored like an e-mail as an entity of its own. There is also no way to create additional folders for SMS messages, so the clutter builds in your SMS inbox rather quickly, depending on how much you use this feature.

The inability to create mailboxes is not, however, the fault of the developers, but rather a limitation of the Treo itself, and the way Palm (previously Handspring) engineered them. Because the Treo does not support SMS folders, neither does Agendus Mail.

On the bright side, if you use a 650, the AGM way of handling SMS conversations may be quite useful, if for no other reason than the exceptionally handy and time-saving QuickText (boilerplate) feature. This clever option allows you to quickly send a simple string of text from a list of choices, which you are free to add to or modify. Send your buddy a quick note like “Let’s meet at O’Malley’s” and save it to your boilerplate list, or select “I’m running late” to quickly reply to the office folks when they are nagging you for your 10-20 (HAM radio jargon for your location)..

QuickText even works in e-mails, which means you can compose a list of simple messages that you can send to your co-workers, friends, or the guy from Mars next-door, all with the tap of a button.

In either case, you can easily enable or disable the AGM SMS account, though turning it off does also mean losing any SMS messages you currently have in your AGM SMS inbox, as you will need to delete your entire AGM SMS account to do so. Because you can’t store SMS messages on a card, it’s impractical to back them up and this way of turning off SMS handling is a real drag.

One for All, all for You

If you are already an Agendus user, you’ll be happy to know that AGM links directly with Agendus and can be quickly set as the default mail client for the messages button in the Agendus toolbar. AGM shares the Agendus toolbar as well, so you can switch between the two applications as smoothly as if AGM was just another Agendus "View."

This simple feature completely streamlines your work environment, as there is no need to constantly flip between half a dozen applications to perform one task. Everything you need is right at your finger (or stylus) tips, including all of your contacts, as AGM is optimized to make adding an existing contact to an e-mail or SMS as slick as can be. Just start typing the contact’s name in the appropriate field, and AGM finds the nearest match for that entity, or tap a button and select from a list of all available contacts. AGM even remembers the most recently used contacts and keeps them stored in a sweet pull-down menu.

Integration doesn’t end there. As long as you have both programs installed, you can create new meetings, tasks, calls, memos, contacts, etc. from within AGM, plus you can create new e-mails or SMS messages from within Agendus. Slick!

Mail Handling and Courier Services

There are several ways to handle mail delivery and receipt in AGM. The primary two are of course over a Hotsync connection, or over your wireless Internet connection. With the latter, there is also an array of options from which to choose. The biggest choice lies in whether you want to send messages immediately when you tap the send button, or queue them up until you instruct AGM to send them all as a batch.

The second of these choices is ideal if you want to compose messages while on the phone, and then send them off when your call ends. On a PalmOS Treo, as you probably know, there's no way on this green Earth to send a data transmission at the same time as you are using the phone, so if you feel the need to write a bunch of memos while talking to your office-mates, the queue options is the way to go.

You may also send or receive messages for only one of your e-mail accounts or for all of them at once. Both of these choices lie in the AGM menus, but you can set which method you prefer in its preferences as the default mode, which will be linked to the time-saving Send/Receive button in the toolbar. In addition, like Agendus, all of the little glyphs in the toolbar are tooltip enabled, meaning that if you tap-and-hold any of them, a contextual popup balloon appears to remind you of the function of said button. Tap-and-hold most any other object on-screen (e.g. an e-mail in your inbox) and AGM displays a pop-up contextual menu with options pertaining to that type of object. In the case of an e-mail, choices include sending, forwarding, replying and the like.

One feature I'd love to see..

As you can see, AGM is a wildly flexible, and feature-packed program. I've used SnapperFish's SnapperMail for a few years and while its feature set is quite similar to AGM, it has one very cool GUI feature that I really missed having in AGM.. in fact I wish ALL PalmOS programs that use a skinny scroll bar on the right edge of the screen had it – for scrolling through long mails, SnapperMail has both a stylus mode and a finger mode .. in finger mode, you can keep your stylus parked and simply touch your fingertip near the vertical scroll bar which instantly expands into a "fat" bar, eliminating the need to turn your finger sideways and use your fingernail to move the scroll bar's slider up and down. I don't remember seeing this wonderful feature in any other PalmOS program I've ever used.

Then again, SnapperMail doesn't have the tight integration with Agendus that AGM has, but I thought that was worth mentioning and I'd urge PalmOS developers to take a look at that finger mode and implement it in their programs.

Agendus Mail is one of the most flexible and innovative e-mail clients for PalmOS. It’s a breeze to set up and use multiple accounts without getting confused or bewildered by all the messages in your inbox, and it’s a snap to send and receive mail from a wide variety of servers. There are only a few limitations of the interface, mostly due to the size of the Treo’s screen, but they are a cinch to overcome with all the different viewing options iambic has crammed into it. Overall, Agendus Mail packs a ton of features in a small application with an even smaller price tag.

 

Criteria  Rating GUI Design 4 Usability 4 Support 5 Value 5 Overall (not an average)

Pros Multiple e-mail accounts and folders for each. Links to Agendus for slick compatibility. Uses the Agendus toolbar and tooltips. Offers SMS messaging. Store message and/or attachments on SD card. Select to send messages immediately or set them in a queue. Send or receive from one account at a time, or all at once. QuickText messages make sending common strings of text a snap.. Supports SSL encryption (SSL Edition Only). Multiple viewing modes.

Cons Lots of tiny icons require heavy stylus use. Some viewing modes are not Treo-savvy. Learning to use all features takes a while.

When you look down at your Treo, how exactly do you reconcile it in your mind? Is it a phone, an organizer, a hand-held computer, a portable media machine, a PDA? All these things in one tidy package?

At its core, even the mighty Treo with all of its expanded widgets, phone and Internet capabilities is still just a super-shiny and primo-priced PDA. Yet, pondering term "Personal Digital Assistant" may conjure up images of a robotic secretary in a shiny leather skirt and Duran Duran’s smash hit "Electric Barberella", or, on the other end of the spectrum, Bender from Futurama."

Unfortunately, though no PDA in the world is that self-automated, or that alluring (or self-aware), there are ways to make these pocket-sized wonders do a lot of the workload that a real-life personal assistant does for you, or would do for you when they aren’t on their way to the hair salon (or bar)..

Agendus' roots..

Not so many years ago, Apple, the same guys who are today flogging their iPods and iPhone on every street corner, invented a sweet hand-held computer dubbed the Message Pad, or by, what the general public would come to call it, the Newton.

Years before anyone ever heard of Palm (Pilot), the Message Pad was the staple food of business execs and gadget-hording geeks alike, selling millions of units before it met its untimely, and premature demise in 1998.

Newton had all of the same general features as most of the current generation Palm devices, sans a color screen or a phone dialer, but the similarities between the two platforms are remarkable. The same types of utilities that you use today: a calendar, to-do (task) list, memo pad, contacts card & address book, and the like. And just like today's Palms, there were thousands of Newton applications, accessories, cases, and add-ons offered by hundreds of mfrs..

However, even in those simpler times people strived for a means to achieve the goal for which their device derives its namesake: To assist you in your fast-paced work life and streamline your productivity. Enter ActionNames.

Designed to keep all of your data organized, keep you posted on all of your upcoming meetings, events, tasks, and general day-to-day mischief, iambic's ActionNames for Newton linked together all of the built in PIMs' (Personal Information Managers) data, and simplified the way you used your PDA.

Unfortunately, upon his return to Apple in 1998, one of the first things Steve Jobs did was to order the instantaneous termination of the entire Newton MessagePad product line, Newton OS, et al. The fury of Newton loyalists was like a tornado sweeping across Kansas. Apple promised a "tiny Mac" replacement for the Newton, many years passed, and they delivered the iPod instead.

This left a huge vacuum in the playing field of handheld computing, and left the market wide open for Palm and its fledgling Pilot to steal away the lion's share of Newton's entire market. It also opened the door for Microsoft to exploit the abandoned users and launch WindowsCE, but that’s a history lesson for another day.

ActionNames morphs into Agendus..

ActionNames, however, did not die with the Newton but rather, the clever folks at iambic decided to port it over to the now less-fledgling Palm platform, where it has been a solid addition to the Palm software library of many a dedicated road-warrior to this very day.

Over the years of its existence, iambic decided that a legal identity change was beneficial, and its makers dubbed the updated version of the product Agendus

Since that time, Agendus has progressively evolved, adapting itself to the latest high-tech gear including our beloved Treos, integrating itself to the new aspects of the Palm devices including the Phone, Internet connection and high-res screen.

Organize your Life, Save Your Sanity

If you work in any high pressure, career-oriented field, you surely know the necessity of keeping it all together, being on time, and managing your hectic schedule as tightly as Ebenezer Scrooge manages his money. Alas, though the PIM programs Palm is kind enough to include with your Treo out of the box may help with the task, they leave much to desire, in the way of ease of use, connectivity and (for all intents and purposes) practicality.

Sure, it's nice to be able to tap a button and bring up the Palm “Calendar” app, but how much detail does it really give you? Or, what happens when you jot down a few notes in “Memo Pad” and then forget in what category you filed them?

Agendus solves the primary problem by linking all of your PIMs together on one application, divided of course into their own screens for easy use, which you may flip between with the tap of an icon. Not only are all of your normal apps linked together (Calendar, Tasks, Memos and Contacts), but Agendus also includes the new categories of Call, Journal Entry, e-Mail, and Trip, further expanding your options for subjects to schedule and keep tabs on.

How much Agendus do you want?

As Agendus comes in three flavors, Standard, Professional and Premier, it may be difficult to choose which version to buy. I’d advise buying either Premier or Professional, as the Standard Edition lacks many of the more useful features and is really more of a "Junior Edition" of the product. The Professional version packs so much more in one application that the $10 jump in price from the Standard Edition is a total bargain.

Of the three, Agendus Professional handles almost everything you could wish for, though if you want to splurge for only $20 more you can get the Premier version which also packages with it Agendus Mail SSL Edition and includes the Agendus Attendees Module, a special add-on that sends instant messages to all of the attendees you schedule to appear at a meeting, offering them the choice to accept or decline wirelessly, and relaying their decision back to your Treo so that you always keep on top of the situation.

Agendus manages these different types of events in what it likes to call views: different viewing modes for each related type of event. Most of the views also have modes, again different ways of viewing a single kind of event.

For example, the built-in Palm Calendar allows you to view the calendar in “Today” mode, which shows a list of what you need to do immediately, over the course of the current day. Or, contrast the 1-Day mode, which displays events on an hour-by-hour basis; the Week Mode which uses graphical indicators (colored boxes) to show meetings scheduled and their times over the current week; or the Month mode, which displays AM, PM and un-timed events for a full calendar month.

While these may be all fine and dandy, Agendus feels that they simply are not enough. In addition to the normal modes, Agendus tosses into the mix a whopping extra 13 total ways of viewing your calendar.

Agendus also expands the functionality and modes of the built in calendar, adding additional data and categories of information. Furthermore, you may select, set or hide exactly what kind of events Agendus displays in Agendus View Options.

The main calendar views are as follows: Today, Weekly, Monthly, Quarterly, and List.

Of course, each of those views has at least three modes, the most useful of which are likely to be Today, Weekly List, Weekly 7-Day Grid, Monthly Icon Mode, Monthly Glance and Trip View. All of the views, modes and features use your internal Palm databases' data, so there is no need to re-enter your already-existing meetings, contacts, etc. Just install Agendus and all of your data is immediately available, and already cross-referenced and linked.

Create a meeting and add a contact with just a few taps. For that matter, almost any data you need in Agendus is just two taps away.

Regarding its calendar views: The Monthly Icon mode has amazing advantages over any other calendar program, as it displays events as icons that you either set manually, or define in Vivid Agenda where you enter key words or phrases and assign an icon to them. Agendus will use these Vivid Agenda rules for all events that have the specified magic words in their description.

Customize it!

iambic offers tons of icon packages that you can install to add to the already included icon set, or if you’re feeling adventurous, you can create or edit your own icons using the built in Icon Editor. Thus, if you make an icon of a beer glass and assign the words “beer” “drinks” to it, when you create an event with the description “Meet Bruce Willis for drinks this Friday” as a meeting or task, the event shows up as a beer glass icon in Monthly Icon mode. In a word: clever. Quickly identifiable visual cues are a good thing.

In any event, you may customize all of the views, and most of what you see on screen, to the Nth degree in Agendus View Options and Agendus Preferences, and you may even customize or expand the icon set.

Of course, it’s also a snap to set alarms for any kind of event. Meeting alarms sound at a set interval before the meeting takes place, and tasks & calls sound at a specified time. Once an alarm sounds, a requester pops up asking if you want to silence the alarm, view the details of the event, mark the event as complete and clear the alarm in one tap, or reschedule the alarm for an amount of time you specify from a pull-down menu.

There IS a learning curve.. but stick with it, it pays off..

I know you’re probably thinking, “Yow, it must be tricky keeping track of all those views!”

Indeed, getting used to Agendus is cumbersome at first, and at times frustrating. Thankfully, the latest version is much less of an “explosion in an Icon Factory” than the previous ten editions, because now when you tap-and-hold any of the icons in the Agendus toolbar, a contextual pop-up balloon also called a tooltip tells you what the function of that button is. This is a huge improvement over the previous chore of guessing (or forgetting) what a particular interface button does.

Thankfully, the more you use it, the more you become accustomed to the various symbols utilized throughout the program.

I can’t stress how handy and valuable this updated feature is, as before, in earlier versions, you had to constantly thumb through the extensive 100-plus page user manual to figure out precisely what the little cuneiform glyphs in the toolbar meant. Paging through all the modes is easier now too, as you can either tap the hard-keyed buttons on your Treo to flip through them, or tap the left and right arrow buttons to page through your Recently Used Modes like the forward and back buttons on any web browser.

Because Agendus utilizes the same PIM databases as your built-in Palm apps, events you schedule in Agendus calendar views also appear in the native Calendar app.

What’s more, when you create a new event in Agendus Pro or Premier, you can add a checklist called a Agenda Walkthrough. With it, you can generate checklist-formatted notes that you use to keep track of things to do for a meeting, task or call. I use them for shopping lists.

Agendus handles tasks in much the same way as the calendar, with a plethora of viewing modes, most notably the Hierarchy mode and in Professional and Premier editions, the Matrix mode.

Hierarchy mode allows you to ‘nest’ tasks in such a way that keeps inter-related tasks together neatly and cleanly. The matrix mode, on the other hand, organizes your tasks in four “windows” by their matrix priority, so that you may keep tasks sorted by how important they are and by whatever means of sorting is most beneficial to you.

Likewise, in the Pro/Premier editions, sort contacts by their relationship to one another in the Networking mode, in which you can link two or more contacts together and completely define how they are related.

Additionally, all versions of Agendus have the capability to view contacts in groups, for example displaying contacts grouped by company. Thus, if you want to see everyone in your address book that works for Widgets Incorporated, you can select to view them grouped by company and everyone that you have entered that company name for (in the appropriate field) will appear as nested entries under the company name. While you are at it, you can also generate a map on-the-fly to any contact for which you have entered an address over your wireless Internet connection, or even get weather information for someone's locale before you call them. "Hey, Steve, how's it going? I see you're having a wicked heat wave there."

The address book is further improved by sorting tabs, much like old-fashioned pen and paper address books where you can tap on a tab (e.g. ABC, GHI, or YZ) and view all the contacts whose names begin with those letters. You can also simply begin typing a contact’s name in the search field at the top of the screen to locate them quickly.

For that matter, finding any data in Agendus is as fast as greased lightning, and as simple as pointing to California on a US map. OK, maybe even simpler.

Agendus includes a vast searching utility called Power Find which you can either use to search for data on your Treo in Contacts, memos, Tasks, Meetings, etc.; or you can search externally on the web, or in 411 lookup. The 411 feature is worth the cost of Agendus Pro alone if you use it even just a few times, and it is very efficient, allowing you to search for a person or business, and dial them, add them to your contacts, or generate a map to their address with just one tap.

iambic even improved the memo pad, albeit slightly, providing a search field right at the top of the screen so you can scan through all those innumerable notes you jot down to find the right info when you need it.

Jet Your Worries Away

Beyond the usual stuff, Agendus also allows you to schedule Trips either by car, or by plane that you plan as you would any meeting, except that you can enter the destination, departure and arrival times, and view the current weather at that location. This makes planning flights quick and simple, alleviating all the horrid trip planning machinations and scheduling mess that usually comes with having to travel by airport.

Of course, if you want to know the weather for your current location, or for any other city in the wide-world for that matter, that’s also right at your fingertips in the Today mode, where you can pull down a weather forecast over the wireless web for an entire week. You can also get historical quotes & facts, and a motivational Tip of the Day in the Today mode, along with a glance at all the tasks, meetings, calls, e-mail and other events you need to do immediately, or, if you're a procrastinator, later :-) ..

Email is handled quite intuitively as well, as you may either link Agendus to your current e-mail client, or if you have Agendus Mail or Agendus Mail SSL Edition (which comes with Agendus Premier) you can view your most recent message headers without ever leaving the Today view.

The cross-compatibility makes Agendus Mail worth a glance even if you are using another mail client steadily, as it assures you the highest level of integration with Agendus and your scheduling abilities.

Finally, if you are always planning events of a similar nature Agendus allows you to create templates for meetings, tasks calls and trips so that you can enter only the relevant data, and leave often repeating info up to Agendus to fill in for you.

While this doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface of all of the mind-boggling feature set that Agendus offers, you can always download a trial copy for yourself at no cost, which runs “out of the box” for three days. After that, you can request a demo code to continue using it for two weeks, evaluating its usefulness to your own specifications, or just jump in and buy it if you’re that bold.

You can also continually update to the latest version wirelessly, and Agendus constantly checks to make sure that you are using the latest available release.