Windows Phone Thoughts: PIMping up your Pocket PC -- Agenda Fusion vs. Pocket Informant

Tasks
Tasks is one of the places where AF and PI begin to diverge. At the initial display, AF separates the task listing based on the due date (none, overdue, etc.) whereas PI’s default Task View shows all tasks upcoming. This is, of course, configurable to show only active tasks. In both cases, the default is to show overdue tasks in red and bolded.


Figure 12: Comparison of task views in AF and PI. Click on the thumbnail for more detail.


Figure 13: Comparison of add task screens in AF and PI. Click on the thumbnail for more detail.

Both allow you to set multi-level priorities to each task, which assists in sorting and can be used to manage tasks on a per-project basis. The settings are the same in each and transferable between PI and AF.

PI takes this a bit further, however, and allows you to create hierarchical trees of tasks. It suggests this as a way of managing projects by essentially replicating the work breakdown structure commonly used in project management tools such as MS Project.


Figure 14: PI’s Hierarchical Task Structure.

Unfortunately, hierarchical tasks are not supported in desktop Outlook. They are all transferred as peer-level tasks.

Linking
AF and PI both provide the ability to cross-link items such as contact names to appointments; notes to tasks or appointments; tasks to appointments or even files and URLs. Here, I found AF’s interface for adding links to appointments more intuitive than PI’s. It took me a little while and some reading through the manual to find out how to add a new link.


Figure 15: Comparison of linkage screens in AF and PI. Click on the thumbnail for more detail.