Review: Pocket Informant for iPhone

Right off the bat here I should let you know that I have not been using Pocket Informant (PI) for iPhone for anywhere near as long as I usually have when reviewing an iPhone app.  It only launched in the App Store yesterday!  But … I have spent a large amount of time using it already and trying out nearly all its main features, and I know a lot of you are very interested in PI on the iPhone, so I admit I have hurried this one along.

I’ll update this post as necessary to fill out any missing information or answers to some questions on things I’m unsure of about the app right now (and have asked the developers about).

Right – now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about this app that has been a popular and award-winning PIM (personal information manager) solution on Windows Mobile and other mobile platforms for many years …

What Does It Do?

Pocket Informant is a PIM application that currently provides Calendar and Tasks / Todo management functions for you on the iPhone.  If you’ve used PI on other platforms, you’ll immediately notice that the iPhone version does not include Contacts or Notes functions (as it has on WinMo) right now.  I’m  not sure if this is due to any Apple restrictions (doubt it) or by choice.

PI offers a much more powerful set of Calendar features than the in-built application has, as well as very effective Tasks management capabilities. It syncs your calendar information with Google Calendar, and your tasks data with the Toodledo online todo application.

One of the things PI is best known for on Windows Mobile is the huge array of features it offers.  This first iPhone version is less feature–packed than its Windows Mobile counterpart – but nonetheless offers a wealth of calendar and todo power.  Here are some of the calendar features listed on its product home page:

Calendar:

• Today View to show your current appointments, Todos and meeting attendees
• Timebars to show your free/busy time at a glance
• Swipe between Months, Days, and Weeks
• Easily jump to any date in Day and Month views
• Expanded detail view to see events and todos on any day
• Todos integrated in the Calendar Views
• Create and Edit Recurring appointments
• Set your first day of week and work hours
• Set a default alarm
• Show up to 3 lines of text per row
• Send Meeting Requests

These are some of its notable To do features:

• Getting Things Done (GTD) support for Projects, Context, Next Action, Inbox
• Franklin Covey Priorities A-Z and 1-99
• Filters to quickly find active, due, overdue, and completed Todos
• Show up to 3 lines of text per row
• Order To dos in Projects
• Star Favorite To dos
• Starring/Flagging Todos
• Setup Status of Next Action through Planning and more on each To do
• Multiple Complete with our innovative multi-select user interface

And here is a slice of the product page’s blurb on how PI is different to other todo managers:

Proper todo management is essential, but it’s only part of the picture. Pocket Informant is a full featured PIM, so it lets you focus on everything you do in a day – not just your todo list. We believe bringing your appointments and todos together in one place is more efficient than working in isolated calendar and todo management systems. Pocket Informant is designed to not force you into any one method of doing things. For example you can use our Todo View as rigidly or freely as you want, using GTD principles, Franklin Covey, or your own system. Pocket Informant also lets you sync your information with popular online services so you can easily access your data with any desktop computer or share it with others.

What Does It Do Well?

The simpler, less feature-packed and settings-packed nature of PI on the iPhone is one of the first things that has really hit me as I’ve begun using it – and I like it a lot.

I’m one of the people who – much as I enjoyed PI on Windows Mobile for many years – had begun to find it just *too* powerful on that platform.  It had become one of those apps where I felt I would only ever use 10% of its abilities, because there were just too many settings, too many options, too many layers to things, for my personal tastes and habits.  I know many others appreciated that very aspect of the app – but for me this simpler, pared-down version of PI is a positive change.

According to some of the details on PI’s App Store description, more features and functionality are coming in future versions.  That’s good, but I hope they will find a happy balance between power / functionality and ease of use.

There are still plenty of settings and options available to you in PI for the iPhone though – including some very useful ones like:

• Choosing your To do mode – either GTD (Getting Things Done method) or Franklin Covey
• Default task importance
• Default alarm and Event Alarm Types (sound, alert, email, text message, none etc.)
• To do Tab Badge settings (whether to show overdue or due today, none, or both)

Another thing Pi has always been known for is its Views – the variety and usefulness of different views it offers.  This is a strong point in the iPhone app as well – though again, there don’t seem to be quite as many view options as there were over on Windows Mobile.

On the main To Do screen you can choose from a number of sub-screens to view your tasks, and you have different views depending on whether you’re using GTD or Franklin Covey as your to do mode.  I prefer Franklin Covey, which gives me these views:

• All Active, In Progress, Overdue, Due Today/Tomorrow, Completed

If you are using GTD, you’ll get these views:

• Inbox, Project, Context, Next Actions, as well as a set of filters you can choose to apply (in progress, overdue etc.)

On the Calendar screen you can switch between List, Day, Week, and Month views.

And of course there’s an excellent Today screen, which shows both appointments and tasks for today …

Adding a new task or calendar appointment is always one tap away via the + button at the top right of the Today, Calendar, and To Do screens.  The entry / edit screens for these offer a strong range of options (for instance, on a repeating event or task you can use pre-set recurrence frequency or set a custom timeframe of your own) while still being easy to use.

There’s a Search screen within the app that will let you search within calendar events, to do’s and contacts.  It does not start searching as you type.

I like the ability to choose your To Do Mode in PI – many people will love using GTD methods, but I’ve found that GTD is just a little too much for me (perhaps too smart for me) but Franklin Covey works fine for my habits and style.

One of the interface features that I like a whole lot on PI for iPhone is the ability to swipe to move forward and backward in all the calendar views. Just swipe to the right to see the next day / week / month, or to the left to go back a day / week / month.  Very slick and useful.

Another great interface feature is that as soon as you select the radio button to the left of a task, or tasks, you get a very neat ‘slide-up’ dialog that lets you Complete or Delete the selected task or tasks.

What’s Not So Good?

In addition to finding many familiar things and good things in PI for iPhone, I’ve also noticed some less than ideal things. Such as …

You cannot re-order tasks unless you use GTD as your To Do Mode.  If you use Franklin Covey, as I prefer, there’s no way that I’ve found so far to choose how your tasks are sorted – i.e by due date, importance level etc.  Even if you do use GTD mode, you have to go the Projects screen to see the re-order options – I think this should be amongst the app’s general settings.

The app offers a Backup and Restore function – but this is currently a very clumsy and awkward routine.  It uses a web server as many apps do, so you can simply use a web browser to carry out the backup / restore – but … when you do this, you’re presented with NINE files and you cannot multi-select them.  So you have to hit download on each of them individually to do a complete backup (and one of them does not download, but just displays sync logs).  I realize this offers flexibility for users to select which elements they want to backup – but a lot of users will have no idea what is backed up by each file anyway, and I think most would prefer at least an option to ‘Backup All’ via one click.  I know I would.

The app appears to do an automatic sync (to Google Calendar / Toodledo if you have set these up) when it is opened – though I’m not sure of this yet, just looks that way to me.  To invoke a manual sync you have to go to the Today screen and use the ‘Sync Now’ button.  I think this button should be present on all screens as it’s a key function.  I also think the app should prompt you at exit, asking whether you’d like to sync.  To be fair, this is a pet peeve of mine with many productivity app that have sync capabilities – as it’s easy to forget to sync manually.

PI for iPhone lets you set task alarms, but it does not let you set an actual time for a task – so the alarms become largely useless, in that you can only set them to be X minutes before a date, rather than a time.

This first version of PI is not rock solid so far in my usage.  It has twice crashed back to the home screen during my first few hours of use.  To its credit, it has crashed relatively gracefully, without freezing up the iPhone itself.

Overall:

Pocket Informant for iPhone feels very polished for a 1.0 version.  The WebIS team have a stellar reputation for their thorough beta testing (and great support) and it shows in this release.

I had a browse through a few pages of App Store reviews of the app this morning.  At least a few users complained of some major slowness in PI.  I have really not seen this so far, to anywhere near the degree some have mentioned (e.g. 10 second screen load times when switching views).  There are a couple places where there is a bit of lag (when tapping to add a new event for instance) – but for me this has meant around a 2-second wait, nothing very severe though.

I think one option that would be very nice to see added is an ability to choose which screen the application displays on launch.  I’d like it to always show the Today screen, for instance – while it currently just opens to wherever you last were in the program.

I’d also like to see more sync alternatives – with other online apps (Remember The Milk for example) or even some desktop apps.  I don’t know how challenging that would be for WebIS in terms of relationships with other vendors, or in terms of the difficulty level of implementing – but I know as an end-user it would appeal to me.

I don’t think PI will displace my favorite tasks app, Things – as I have grown to love using Things on both the iPhone and the desktop.  I can get away with using just a Tasks program because I’m a very, very light Calendar user.  Back in the days when I was out at multiple client sites every day, PI’s combo of tasks and calendar in one app was a must, but not anymore for me.

If you need an iPhone application to manage your tasks and calendar (s), Pocket Informant should be a major contender for your consideration.  As far as I know, it is the *only* app that will do both of these things for you right now – and do it elegantly via a slick interface, offer a great selection of views, and a strong list of features for calendar and to do management.

You can find Pocket Informant in the App Store now, for an ‘introductory’ price of $12.99.

UPDATE:

Alex Kac – the main man at WebIS – has been kind enough to come back with some rapid answers on all the questions I had about the 1.0 and future versions of PI on the iPhone.  Here they are:

On the need to use the ‘Sync Now’ as the only method of invoking sync from within the app:

For 1.0 we implemented a manual sync mostly because frankly and realistically – its 1.0 and with Apple’s guidelines we could only have a small number of testers (compared to public betas of 1000s). So for 1.00 you sync when you hit the sync now button on today screen.

On the need for more and better sorting options:

Sorting and filtering are something that we were planning on putting in 1.00, but pushed to a post 1.0 release. The code is mostly done – 85% of the way – but the last 15% was too much to put into 1.00. The idea will be to filter by calendar, sort by most fields, offer multiple sort conditions, and so on.

About Contacts and Notes integration:

Both Contacts and Notes are in the plans.

And, best of all in my view, some words on potential new sync options:

More sync partners – we’re looking at that now that we know Apple won’t help there. We’ve put in a request with Remember-The-Milk, and we’re also looking at OmniFocus with their WebDAV sync method. Things on the Mac is great and we want to do something there too, but we’re in the exploration phase of that still.

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