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Order from chaos
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February 20, 1998: 6:36 p.m. ET
Commentary: CNNfn's Steve Young on the software that changed his life
From Correspondent Steve Young
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NEW YORK (CNNfn) - The spreadsheet program Lotus 1-2-3, initially published in the early 1980s, was the first "killer app."
It wasn't the first spreadsheet program; that was VisiCalc.
But 1-2-3 worked better. It legitimized the PC as a business tool, although 1-2-3's birth ultimately left its parent, Lotus Development Corp., mired in a sort of postpartum blues.
The company had trouble developing a follow-up product that could fill some other niche.
Lotus acquired and improved a word processor and turned it into Ami Pro, but it took the company years to hit on something as novel as 1-2-3.
Finally, Lotus offered Lotus Notes, a "groupware" product.
Although Lotus Notes enables people to collaborate on work, share information and synchronize changes in documents, it's a very hard product to explain, and even more difficult to learn to use.
It wasn't until software guru Esther Dyson nudged me about Notes that I began to pay attention to it.
The "tripwire news" was that giant banks started reporting Notes was measurably increasing work-force productivity.
A few years ago, I served as a judge for Computer Press Association awards. Several of the entrees in my category grappled with what Notes is all about.
All of the writers remarked that explaining Notes makes rocket science look easy. Reading all the prose on Notes made my head ache. I should have listened harder to Esther.
In the past few years multimedia and the Internet have pretty much subsumed the software industry's efforts to create new product categories.
That's probably just as well, because there were many dubious efforts.
I was sure I'd been exposed to another lame idea when some PR guy called about this really hot "personal-information manager," or "PIM" -- the first time I'd ever heard the term.
The acronym alone sounded stupid. It felt like marketing mavens were trying too hard.
The term "PIM" popped up at about the same time that people stopped talking about "making contacts" and started talking about how good they were at social "networking."
Well, it's time to make a bold confession --when it comes to PIMs, I was wrong.
I don't mean products like Starfish Software's Sidekick, which has its place.
Instead, I have in mind Micro Logic's Info Select, a different kind of information manager which has become central to my working and private life.
Info Select contains the power to put all of my reporter contacts on tap -- even if I've forgotten somebody's first name, last name, company or contact date.
It lets me whip through the equivalent of oceans of Post-It notes when the phone rings, I recognize a voice, but can't recall when I and the person on the other end of the line met. It can make a messy desk neat.
I got hooked on Info Select during its adolescent, days when Hackensack, N.J.-based Micro Logic initially released the product as Tornado Notes.
The company calls Info Select an "adaptable PIM."
What's cool about the product is that if you don't want to get pigeon-holed into using pre-determined templates, you don't have to.
Info Select is fundamentally easy to use (at least the basic functions are).
Over the years, it has grown in power (and, unfortunately, added some complications). It now has an e-mail function (overkill) and a spell-check utility (useful sometimes.)
But it's definitely not a relational database, and if you wish, it can work in a very free-form fashion. It's a lot like a stack of Post-Its or 3" x 5" cards.
You can start a new note just be clicking on an icon or from the pulldown menu at the toolbar.
I first latched onto to Tornado Notes when it was a DOS product, and continue to use some of the keyboard commands from the early days. For example, you can start a new note by typing the letter "n" for "new."
The power of Info Select is its ability to drill through thousands of records to find the one, the few or the many that contain what you're searching for. I can type "g IBM" and pull up notes from every IBM story I've done over the last decade, and every IBM contact -- all in about a second.
Nothing has organized my life more efficiently than Info Select. It is my absolute favorite software program -- bar none.
Info Select is a combination shoebox, Rolodex and secretary.
It's so intertwined in my working day it often feels like a companion. It's gotten slicker over the years and adopted a prettier interface.
It's also been a great way to manage restaurant lists, "To Do" lists and so forth. It has a built-in calendar that allows you to do long-range scheduling and jogs your memory with visual and auditory alarms.
I admit it -- I was wrong about personal-information managers. Info Select gives PIMs at least one good name.
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Micro Logic Corp.
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