Windows Phone Thoughts: Life Through a Fisheye Lens -- DateLens 1.02 Reviewed

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Wednesday, October 15, 2003

Life Through a Fisheye Lens -- DateLens 1.02 Reviewed

Posted by Don Tolson in "SOFTWARE" @ 09:00 AM


Can I Change What it Looks Like?
Yes, you can. DateLens comes with a Preferences panel, but as you can see, the scope of what's available is somewhat limited.


Figure 5: DateLens Preferences Panel

DateLens also provides what they call a 'Mondrian Skin', which is available from the View menu.


Figure 6: Day View with Mondrian Skin

I'm not exactly sure what the significance of the colour change is, but according to Miriam-Webster's Dictionary, 'Mondrian' refers to "Pieter Cornelis Mondriaan (1872-1944), a Dutch painter who developed ‘neoplastic’ aesthetic involving reduction of paintings to elements of straight lines, primary colors, noncolors". Sorry, not being versed in such things, I can't explain it either.

Installation
DateLens requires the .Net Compact Framework to run. Those of you with Pocket PCs running Windows Mobile 2003 already have this installed in ROM. Otherwise, a copy can be downloaded from Microsoft or Windsor Interfaces' Web site. With all the applications being built on .Net these days, it's almost essential to have it installed on your Pocket PC.

Installation of DateLens is a little different from normal in that you can directly download the appropriate .CAB file for your processor right from Windsor Interfaces' Web site. Then, simply execute (double-tap) the .CAB file on your Pocket PC and installation proceeds from there. Unfortunately, this means you don't get the chance to tell the application where you want it installed, so there's no way to tell it to move to a CF or SD card if you're short on memory. On the plus side, it appears DateLens only needs 104K once installed, so it can usually fit into main memory somewhere.

Once installed, you'll find the DateLens icon in your Programs folder from the Start Menu. When tapped, be patient, it takes a while for DateLens to load. I noticed this same behaviour on other applications built on the .Net Compact Framework, so it may have something to do with program initialization. Then, depending upon the size of your appointments database, there will be a further delay while DateLens loads all the data. On my iPAQ 2215, with about 1500 appointments the whole process took about 20 seconds. Not a huge wait, but not something I'd want to go through each time I accessed the program. Fortunately, as per Microsoft standards, tapping the X in the top right just puts the program aside rather than shutting it down, so subsequent accesses are quite speedy.

Once you’ve gotten past the initial load, transitions between views in DateLens are quite crisp and there’s little noticeable delay as you move from month to month, ahead or back through multiple years. I did experience one crash in the week that I was working with DateLens, but I was able to simply restart the program again with no loss of data.

Gotchas
As mentioned before, DateLens is not (yet) a full PIM, nor does it try to be one. But there are a couple of other things which would be good to have in the next release:
  • Only calendar/appointment data is displayed. Tasks which have due dates or contacts associated with an appointment are not shown.
  • Not all fields in the Outlook appointment database are available to update. Specifically, I couldn't find anywhere to specify a Category for an appointment.
  • There are some functions within Pocket Outlook that are not supported. For instance, on a Recurring Appointment, if you select to modify just this appointment (not the series), you can't alter the reminder time or the privacy flag.
  • If the find function doesn't find any matches, there's no notification that nothing was found - other than nothing has been highlighted.
  • Lack of help documentation.
  • There's no way to tell DateLens to install to anywhere other than the programmed location.
Where to Buy
DateLens is available from Handango for $15 USD. [Affiliate] A trial version which will work for two weeks is also available there.

Specifications
Windsor Interfaces provides versions of DateLens for all almost all the processors used in handheld computing: ARM (Pocket PC 2000 & 2002 - StrongARM and XScale processors), ARMV4 (Pocket PC 2003 - StrongARM and XScale processors), MIPS, SH3, X86, and WCE420x86. There is also a PC Desktop version available, but this is unsupported.

Conclusions
The user interface used by DateLens is intriguing and definitely shows considerable research behind the display and interaction. Will it replace Pocket Outlook as my primary Calendar View? Not yet.... While I'm not a fan of over-featured PIMs trying to do everything including taking out the garbage for me, there are still some features missing and a certain level of integration which I need to really make it a complete replacement.

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