Pocket PC Thoughts: Manage Your Life from the Palm of Your Hand with Agenda Fusion 8

Into the Belly of the Beast
When I started evaluating Agenda Fusion I discovered that this application is jammed packed with a whopping 11 views to choose from. It was then that I realized this was quickly turning into an endurance run. It also became obvious to me that there is no way that I'll be able to cover every feature here, but hopefully I can give enough of a view into this application to help you determine whether it's worth an try.


Figure 1: List of available views.

Out of these 11 views, seven of them are calendar specific views. You can quickly switch between them by clicking on the Calendar tab on the toolbar. I have no doubt that if there's a certain way that you like to see your appointments, you'll find it here.


Figure 2: List of available calendar views.

It should be said here, that right out of the gate, you'll notice that there are no softkeys present at the bottom of the view. This might not be a large issue for some, but having been using Windows Mobile 5 for several months now, I'm surprised that Developer One has not even provided an option to switch between the toolbar and softkeys.

The Today View
The first thing you'll see when starting Agenda Fusion is the Today View and it looks suspiciously like the regular Windows Mobile today screen. In fact if it wasn't for the toolbar at the bottom I would have thought that it was mine. Theme and all.


Figure 3: The Today View.

The Today view gives you a quick look at today's appointments and a list of incomplete tasks to help you manage your day. This view appears with the same theme specified in your today settings, but you change them in by using the Customize View option. So, if it looks like the standard today screen, then what’s point? I'm glad you asked, because I was wondering the very same thing. To answer this I had to actually load up the default Calendar and Task plug-ins, since I haven't used them in a long time. For starters, neither the default calendar plug-in nor the tasks plug-in allow you to scroll through individual items. In fact the task plug-in only gives you a count of what you've got. The Agenda Fusion Today View gives you all of that and more. You have access to a full context menu for a given item.


Figure 4: The appointment context menu.

You can also filter what you see on this view by category. Agenda Fusion also gives you the ability to create custom filters of your own.


Figure 5: The Custom Category filter editor.