Pocket Informant — An Exclusive Sneak Preview

Back in the middle of July, when third party applications were first available for download to the iPhone, I wrote a piece praising Alex Kac of WebIS  for being upfront about why a planned iPhone version of his well-known Pocket Informant was not yet available for the iPhone. In a post on the WebIS blog, Alex made it clear, that he would rather take the time to do the job properly then rush an application to market. I immediately expressed my respect for in his decision. In light of the fact that firmware 2.0 should never have been released due to its high degree of bugginess and my numerous experiences with applications which didn’t get their act together until after a number of updates, my opinion that Alex was correct in his decision was reinforced more than once.

More than six months later I still have deep respect for Alex’s choice. But I will say… it has already been six months and that is an eternity in the fast-moving world of iPhone applications! 

I don’t mean that as a criticism, far from it, but as a simple statement of fact. Six months is a long time to wait for the release of an application and in this amount of time there have been numerous releases of calendar and task applications.

While the iPhone universe is indeed large and there’s always room at the table for a variety of similar apps, the six month period could mean Alex faces an upheld battle when PI is finally released. Fortunately, nothing has, as yet,emerged as the dominant app for calendar and task management. One excellent program for calendar and tasks that is currently available is SmartTime. SmartTime takes an interesting and unique approach. I will be reviewing it in the next few weeks but to play my hand now, while it is good, it takes such a different approach that I suspect it will have limited appeal.

But What Of PI? We’ll have some details tomorrow and… it’s all good!