Sidekick for Windows: The return of an old friend

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!