Sidekick for Windows: The return of an old friend

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): Here's the old friend that I told you about some time ago. Its name is Sidekick for Windows. Its first incarnation, Sidekick, was one of the first programs responsible for getting me so greatly enchanted by computers back in 1987. Sidekick was a Terminate and Stay Resident -- or TSR -- program that I could leave sleeping behind other programs, such as WP 5.0. When I needed its help, I only had to press its hotkey and it would take over the PC, and it would help me do different things such as writing down notes, scheduling appointments, and creating all sorts of lists. Sidekick was succeeded by Sidekick Plus, which added modem-based and phone-based communication capabilities to my PC. With this capability, I was able take a short break from my research paper and log in to my campus computer and chat with a friend without closing the word processor first.

According to Borland International -- the company that made this software -- three million copies of Sidekick were sold and twice as many were illegally copied, installed and used. That demonstrates how popular this program was in those old DOS days.

Three-in-one

Three-in-one is perhaps the most overused phrase nowadays. And, in the morning rush hours, when you happen to be driving alone to your work in Jakarta, three-in-one may even become the most despised phrase in your mind. However, it still does a fairly good job describing Sidekick for Windows (SKW). This program has three principal parts: the Card File, the Calendar and the Notes. The Card File is the strongest feature of this Personal Information Management, or PIM, program.

The Card File lends itself easily to customizing. Its screen allows you to view all the cards that you have in your file inside a window on the left. It has tabs along the bottom of the window, so that you can move directly to the card you want. Select any card on the left and you'll be able to read its contents, even edit them directly, in a separate window on the right. Actually, you can even customize the layout of these two windows as well. The Card File contains fields that you can define to organize the information on the cards. At the top of each card is the index line. The index lets you customize how your cards are sorted in the Card file. Each Card File can have up to 20,000 cards. In each card, you can define up to 100 fields.

You can build an unlimited number of Card files. They will help you organize your address book or keep track of your inventories. You can also build a list of reference materials, or a list of your CD collection. Using the data in your Card File, you can print mailing addresses directly to Avery labels. The Print Labels dialog box lets you customize a lot of things, including the fonts for the labels.

Moving around

To hop from one part of SKW to another, say from the Card File to the Calendar, you can use the Deskpad Controls. Each of the parts has its own button, and clicking on it will take you to the associated part. While the Card File is used for storing information such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers, the Calendar helps you organize your day by recording and scheduling your appointments, calls, and daily and long-term tasks, multi- day events, as well as those special days in your life.

The Notes view is used for recording notes, ideas, letters, memos, journals, and other textual information in a free-form style.

If you have a modem, the Phone lets you quickly dial a number stored in your Card File. To make a call, simply drag a card from the Cards list to the Phone icon on the Deskpad. The first number on that card is dialed.

Like in Lotus Organizer, The Trash icon works just like you would expect it to. To delete a card, note, or calendar activity in Sidekick, simply drag it into the Trash icon on the Deskpad. But, unlike Organizer, you won't see fire engulfing your trashed item in SKW.

All the goodies

In addition to the stuff mentioned above, SKW tries to help simplify your life with a call management system to log incoming and outgoing calls, a report generator for pulling together information from your Card File and Calendar, a wide range of printing options for address books, calendars and notes, as well as the ability to import from and export to several text and database formats.

You can set the Coverpage up so that it will remind you of what you have to do each day as you boot your PC and start Win dows. With its Launchbar, on which you can add icons to start other applications, Sidekick can even act as a Windows shell.

If don't want it to be your shell, that's fine. You can drag its icon onto the Startup group and it will be started each time you start Windows. If you drag the Quickmenu icon from Sidekick group windows to the Startup group, a tiny icon will sit on the left of the Title bar of your active application. Clicking on this icon will give you the option to jump to any one of SKW modules.

If you do a lot of computation but don't want a real calcu lator to crowd your desk, you'll like SKW since it also comes with a general purpose calculator. (You can see it on the right side of the accompanying illustration.)

Finally, what good is a PIM without search capability? SKW allows you to do full text search in every field and its associated notes. You can even add conditions such as Boolean operators and less-or-greater-than arguments to your search criteria. Its powerful and fast, too.

Downsides

Obviously Borland forgot the need of those who would be using higher resolutions than VGA when they wrote the program. On my 1024 by 768 resolution display, I encountered some glaring prob lems. One of those was the size of displayed text. SKW has no provision for changing the fonts and font sizes of the display. However, you can still change the fonts and their size on the reports.

The default screen fonts are a bit too small, and this makes it difficult for me to read the appointments and the contents of the cards. It also results in overlapping text, which is a rather ugly albeit frequent sight in Windows.

Another problem is that SKW also eats up a fairly big chunk of system resource, seven percent when it is running and three percent when it has been closed down. If you happen to be using Microsoft Office and its OLE 2.0 facility a lot, this news is not very pleasing. On the other hand, compared to Lotus Organizer -- by far still the most versatile PIM today -- SKW's resource requirement is forgivable. Organizer takes up about 16 percent of resource, and it will keep your system resource down three percent after it is closed.

There's no reason for me to doubt that the next incarnation of SKW will be a hit. That is usually the case with the second generation. In the meantime, though, I have to admit that I still prefer using the Day Planner tool from Norton Desktop for Windows 3.0. It has large and clear fonts for the display, it takes up a very small amount of system resource, and it meets most of my requirements. Best of all, it comes included in NDW 3.0!