Developer One has finally managed to release the initial version of Agenda Fusion 7 for the PocketPC. The PocketPC aftermarket organizer field is pretty much between Agenda Fusion and Pocket Informant. Many longtime Agenda Fusion users, including myself, believed that AF had fallen behind Pocket Informant both in features and speed. I was close to switching, but the promise of a version 7 had me hold off and I’m glad.
The major improvement with the initial release of version 7 is a Projects view, which addresses the major complaint I had about Agenda Fusion, which was its lack of any sort of hierarchical system for organizing tasks, appointments, etc.
See, thanks to Conversant I already have the habit of tagging everything with ludicrous detail. Agenda Fusion fed that need in an organizer since it lets you create categories and assign multiple categories to tasks, appointments and contacts. I’ve got about 50 different categories.
It also has an excellent filtering system so I can create a filter, say Office Computer, which will show all of the tasks that I need to get done that can be done on my office computer. This sort of context-based task tracking is something I stole from Getting Things Done, and I love it. I also have categories and subcategories for my various websites and weblogs.
But dammit, sometimes I also needed a straightahead hierarchical view of my tasks. I got to the point where I was maintaining some tasks in both ListPro — a nice, advanced list/outline software — and in Agenda Fusion. The new Project view in Agenda Fusion takes care of that. I can create “projects” in an outliner and then assign existing tasks, appointments and contacts to them. So I can quickly switch between a project-based view of my tasks and appointments and a simple flat context-based view of my tasks and appointments (for a bit of context, I’m very anal and have about 700-1000 tasks at any given moment).
The UI for the Project view — especially adding tasks, etc. to it — still needs some work, but even in its early stages Agenda Fusion 7 really takes the software to that cliched “next level.”