Getting ready for my shift from the PalmOS-based Treo to the Blackberry, due to arrive (I hope) Monday. I’m going to miss the Palm platform; for all its flaws and increasing single-threaded obsolescence, a lot of my life has been spent (and stored) in it.
Most of the apps I actively use on the Treo have Blackberry versions. Another old chapter being closed, though, is my Contact software. I’ve been using a program called PSA Cards for about as long as I’ve been using a Palm device. It’s a simple, fast, powerful contact manager that does just what I want — stores addresses, phone numbers, and notes about folks, and can sync up with the Palm.
I found it much more convenient than using a Windows contact manager. At the time, Windows had multiple of them (not to mention various approaches even within Outlook), and every new release of Windows or Office would create something new. PSA Cards was a lot faster and, unlike Outlook, didn’t require opening an overly-bloated e-mail/PIM every time I wanted to look up an address.
Alas, PSA Cards is no longer supported (the market for small, fast, easy, compatible contact managers being, apparently, a trivial one), and my old installation doesn’t do anything with the Blackberry.
The Contacts setup in Outlook has largely stabilized, mercifully, but I still had problems with using Outlook for all my contact info, since it’s a humongous app, and I didn’t want to spend a couple of minutes for it to load up just to check a number (similarly, I didn’t want to leave it loaded all the time just for that).
So I’ve downloaded and am trying out Contacts Plus, a separate application that just accesses the Contacts in Outlook (and, if you’re offline, will use the offline file as a source). It still load a scosh slowly (it’s a huge file), but it’s a cleaner interface than Outlook and has a much smaller memory footprint, making it much more acceptable for not-in-the-office use.
Now that I have all my data exported from PSA Cards to Outlook’s Contacts, I’ll let you know how it works.