will@celia.UUCP (Will McCown) (05/27/91)
Getting no response to my previous posting asking about the Sparcom
"Personal Information Manager" card for the HP-48, I went ahead and
bought one. For the benefit of others here is a brief review:
What you get is a real epson style card (with metal shutter), and a
~50 page instruction book, all packaged in a box of the same form
factor and style as the HP product boxes. It provides appointment
calender, notepad, phone directory, expense diary, and time clock,
functions.
The package is better than any of the public domain stuff I have
tried, but only because it is reasonably complete and integrated. As
a whole the pack is disappointingly limited, and not up to the HP-48
standard of quality. (As though there were such a thing.)
I suspect that the functions are largely written in RPL as the
response is quite sluggish. There are only two entry points to the
installed library, an ABOUT function giving the copyright message,
etc. and PIM which takes you to the top level "calender" display.
The top level calender display has a option to mark all dates with
appointments with an "A". Unfortunately this severely slows down
operation, as it now has to search through all appointments before
bringing this display up. Without appointment markers it takes about
3 seconds to bring up the calender display, already slow, but with
the appointment markers turned on it can take 15 or more seconds with
a reasonable number of appointements. Since the calender display is
central to using any functions, slowing it down slows down everything.
The appointment book is called from the main calender display. To go
to a different date you must return to the main calender screen (with
its long wait) highlight the new date and return to the appointment
screen. You can set an alarm for any appointment and have the alarm
lead the appointment time. However, for some strange reason, the
lead time can only be picked from a table of 17 values ranging from 0
to 1 week. For example: if you wanted 1.5 hours your choices are 1
or 2 hours.
There is no provision for repeating appointments, if you want to
enter your weekly staff meetings you must enter them one at at time.
Also blocking out a group of days (e.g. a trade show, or vacation)
must also be done a day at at time and can be very tedious.
The notepad is just what it should be: an alphabetized list of
strings. Unfortunately the "view" function will only show as much of
a note as will fit on the screen. It will not scroll down to show
additional lines. If you want to see more you must either edit the
entry or produce a report both of which take longer.
The phone directory is rather poorly thought out. It has separate
records for Name, Company, Street address, City & state line, Home
number, Work number, Fax number, E-mail address, and Miscellaneous.
You can sort the directory by any of these records. (I can't imagine
why you would want to sort by other than name but ...) For correct
alphabetizing you must enter names in the form Last, First. In
practice I use the "Name" field for either person names or company
names whichever I want to be used for indexing. It is possible to
put carriage returns in the records, but none of the display routines
handle this well. The quick display (reach by hitting enter) Only
shows Name, Company, Phone numbers, and Email address fields. It
also makes an attempt to center the phone numbers which fails
miserably if there are any carriage returns. The "full" display has
one line per record. To see all of a record (if it doesn't fit in
the displayed line) it is necessary to edit it. Some entries in my
address book have city, state & zip code lines which will not fit on
an HP-48 line. For these entries there is NO WAY to display the
entire name and address at once, even though using multiple lines it
would fit quite comfortably.
Because of these problems, I may soon abandon the phone directory
function and use the note function to keep my address book instead.
There also is no quick way to go to a particular section of the phone
list (the q's for example). There is however a case-sensitive
search. A non-case-sensitive search would be useful. So would a
word search. Sparcom's suggested solution to the case problem is to
make entries all uppercase. An UGLY solution IMHO. (If they were
really clever they would write a regular-expression search, but oh
well ...)
The structure of the phone directory and notebook are documented in
the manual, for those who want to load them from a different source.
None of the other varibles or file structures are documented.
The expense log and hours log are very similiar. Both require
selecting the date from the calender display before any entries can
be made. Both share a common account list. The hours log has
start/stop function which will use calculator clock to make log
entries. Unfortunately you can only have one such entry active at a
time (you can't work on more than one thing at a time). It also does
not provide any easy way to correct the start time if, for example,
you forgot to push "start" the moment you walk in the door. It also
only allows logging of durations, not start and stop times as I would
have liked. The account selector menu always comes up with the last
account you selected which is convenient.
The report generator can be called from any of the main functions.
It can send output to the screen, IR printer, 48sx file, wire kermit,
or IR kermit. For hours or expenses it will collect those expenses
within a range of dates for either any particular account or all
accounts, and produce a list with subtotals by account (if all
accounts was selected). For the appointment calander the report
generator will produce a list of all appointments for a range of
dates. You can also produce a report from the notes function (which
is just a listing of a select note or all notes), or the phone
directory (which will allow an alphabetic range). A report is the
one place where imbedded carriage returns in data records will work
correctly.
The program does seem to handle ATTN very well, usually aborting
whatever is happening and returning you to a higher level or aborting
altogether whichever is appropriate. It reliably restores the stack
and current directory whenever exiting.
The manual warns that in order to sort the phone directory by other
than name you must have enough memory for a copy of it. In fact to
do anything to the phone directory, even look at it, you must have
enough memory for a copy. If PIM runs out of memory it simply aborts
with NO error message or other indication as to what went wrong.
There should be a way to handle big data structures without needing
to make a complete copy everytime something is done to the structure.
Sparcom's brochure for this package (including the copy which came in
the package) advertises "Time Value of Money" functions to "simplify
personal business calculations". There is no evidence of such
functions being provided. I guess this falls under the standard
"subject to change without notice" disclaimer.
--
Will McCown, Rhythm & Hues, Inc.
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