The Warped Site - Relish Review


 * Time and information organizer

Introduction
Relish is an information management tool, which main purpose is to keep track of things that need to be done and when to do them. In this respect, it directly competes with applications like Lotus Organizer or the scheduler application in StarOffice. Relish is a stand-alone application, which offers little if any integration with other software tools. However, more than any other of its competitors, it is highly integrated in the OS/2 Workplace Shell. Relish is used for your personal scheduling needs, whereas Relish Net is available for Worksgroups on a LAN. Where pure speed and ease of use is important, this application has some considerable advantages over its contenders. Features like "Type-to-search" and "Relish Buns" should appeal to many users and make them seriously consider Relish as their premier native OS/2 information management solution.

Installation
The complete program fits on just two floppy disks, which indicates that it contains some very tight code. This simple fact becomes even more impressing, once you start working with Relish and realize that you're dealing with a 32-bit, full featured, graphical Workplace Shell enabled application.

It comes with its own installation routine, which sets you up hassle free and ready to go in only a few minutes time. During the installation process you can select to have the startup.cmd file automatically updated. This will activate an automatic reminder service at bootup, so Relish doesn't even have to be running to still produce reminder messages for important events. Installation completes after having created two new objects on your Desktop: a program object and the Relish Buns folder, which will be discussed later on.

Once installed, Relish takes about 2 Mb of hard disk space, which is a ridiculously small amount in comparison with some other applications. The package contains a classy 200 page manual, but the complete program documentation is available as an online help file as well.

Concept, interface and main features
To hold the different kinds of data you work with, Relish uses so-called "notes". They contain detailed information about all kinds of things, such as tasks you have to complete, phone calls you need to make, people you have to meet, addresses, phone numbers, etc.

When you first start the program, it opens a collection of windows on your Desktop, each offering a different way to work with notes.The Note Palette is probably the easiest way to create a new note. It contains icons for each of the six different types of notes used by Relish: Appointments, Meetings, General Purpose, Phone Calls, To-Do notes and Run Program notes. The last one is used to start other programs on your system at a specified time. Create a note with a double click on one of the icons. Alternatively, drag an icon to the Reference Calendar or drop it somewhere on the time scale in the main window to schedule a note with the specified time information already in place.

The Reference Calendar stays visible on the Desktop (only if you want it to) even when the main program window is minimized. It offers a very convenient way to track dates, but it can also be used to schedule notes and provide time information using drag 'n drop. The main window gives access to all program features. By default, it contains a graphical representation of your schedule. Based on the view you select, a daily, weekly or monthly schedule summary is being displayed here as well. Optionally, you can have your to-do list displayed, or even your phone book entries. In addition to displaying information from your schedule, the main window contains a variety of elements that can be used in drag 'n drop operations.

Compared to applications like Lotus Organizer, Relish is by no means short of features. The main keyword here is flexibility. Most of its features are wide open and it's up to the user to decide how to use them to manage his information.

Notes can include as much or as little information as you feel necessary. There's no need to fill in any of the fields when scheduling a note. On the other hand, there are a few special features to each note, which you are free to use whenever you need them. Relish offers a wide variety of ways to repeat notes and there's a number of options to define exactly how you want to be reminded of them. The Memo feature lets you attach custom information to a note using the built-in text editor. If you like, you can use an external editor for this as well.

Searching and finding information in notes, is as easy as scheduling them. Relish looks up any note or just the specific type of note you're interested in. You're free to use as much or as little information to define the search criteria. Relish can look up notes using time information, keywords, contact information, remarks, or any combination. If the data you're looking for is in view (eg.. you have opened the phone book or to-do list), just start typing in a keyword and Relish will make sure that the corresponding entry gets highlighted.

Relish is a time saver...
Relish naturally depends on the information provided by the user to do its job right. Therefore, it has more than a few features that were specifically designed to make data input as easy and quickly as possible.

First of all, the program accepts data in many different ways. You can use keyboard or mouse to access all program features, there are customizable menus, objects have popup menus when right clicked upon and there's a fully customizable iconbar.

Drag 'n drop has clearly been given a lot of attention by the developers. Actually, it's quite amazing what can be done with it. To help you schedule notes, virtually all elements of the user interface can be dragged to or from another element to provide Relish with the information it needs. Drag notes, times, dates, phone book entries, summary lines, ... and drop them anywhere you like to accomplish the most simple or complicated scheduling operations. Not only is it possible to drag objects within Relish itself, but you can also interface with other Desktop objects and programs. Drag a Relish object to your favorite text editor, to get a text representation of it. Use the printer and shredder on your Desktop or customize Relish using the standard OS/2 palettes, ... Needless to say this aspect of the program is quite impressive. Why don't all OS/2 programs work this way?

In addition to all this, Relish constantly tries to interprete and estimate what kind of information it is you are giving. This ability means a great time saver when adding appointments or meetings to your schedule. Very often you don't have to complete the information for Relish to understand it. For example, the time period from 3pm until 5pm can be entered as "3-5" and Relish will understand exactly what you mean. "3 am Wednesday, September 15 1999" can be entered as "300 se 15". Even if you're unsure how Relish will "translate" the information, you can leave open an analysis window on the Desktop to display a real-time interpretation of the text you're typing.

The "Type-to-search" mechanism is another example of how Relish saves time while you work with the program. With a time schedule in front of you, just start typing a keyword to look up an appointment or any other note you've made. As you're typing, Relish immediately jumps to the first corresponding note in the schedule that contains the text you've just typed. Continue typing to refine the search. This is one of the fastest ways I've ever seen to look up an entry in a phone book.

The Phone Book : a few remarks...
The phone book in Relish is about the only thing that is not up to level with other features of the program. Of course, it still offers a great deal of flexibility in the way you record contact information, but having so few fields for phone numbers and addresses seems a little awkward to me. While the phone number field accepts several numbers, which can all be labeled, I wish the developers had provided separated fields for each of them. I would also have liked some more fields to hold address information and a separate field for an E-mail address would have been nice too.

These are all minor disadvantages, since they can all be easily circumvented. However, they do have a serious impact on one other important feature : import and export of address book data. Even though Relish imports data in CSV format, this seems of little use to me since most other address books use more than one field for names, phone numbers and addresses (at least the IBM Works phone book does). This means you will still have to manually format the CSV file to be able to import the correct fields into the Relish phone book. I didn't have time for that and decided to manually type in the data all over again. As I was doing this, it turned out that the current setup has some advantages as well, as it allows very fast data input. One other noteworthy feature is the ability to group entries, effectively giving you a way to create an unlimited number of separated books, while the information in each of them stays linked together.

Something I also didn't like about Relish right from the start was the default color scheme. It just looks a little too "eye-catching" to me. You might want to modify it right after you start Relish for the first time. Luckily, this is a very easy thing to do, because Relish lets you drag colors and fonts from the standard OS/2 palettes. It also includes an option to automatically change the color scheme to something a little more discrete.

Relish Buns are hot!
With what Sundial has decided to call "Buns", Relish offers a totally flexible and powerful way of presenting information exactly the way you want it. Depending on what you want to do with it, Relish Buns are capable of presenting your schedule and phone book in a variety of ways. There are a couple of predefined Buns that will suit most of your needs when you first start working with the program. These default Buns represent your daily, weekly or monthly schedule, your list of To-Do items and the entries in your phone book.

Because nobody manages his or hers schedule in exactly the same way, it is of course possible to create your own customized Buns. For example, you could create a Bun to list only a subgroup of your entire phone book (eg.. members of the Belgian OS/2 User Group). You could put it anywhere on the Desktop or in any other folder. You could make a number of copies of it and customize each of them separately or better still: put shadows right where you need the data the most: in project folders, on the WarpCenter, etc. While this Bun only displays a subset of your entire phone book, it still allows adding, modifying or deleting phone book entries, even if they don't belong to the subset of data represented by this particular view. Data in each of the Buns you create is still linked together and whenever a modification is made anywhere, all Buns will immediately be updated with the new information. If a particular Bun is of no more use, you can safely drag it to the Shredder. You won't lose any information because it's only the Desktop object you're deleting and not the actual data itself.

Buns are a new kind of Workplace Shell object and thus can be used in exactly the same way as all other OS/2 objects. This is precisely the beauty and power of the concept. While many other programs might offer the same kind of flexibility to present information, Relish takes the capabilities that are already present in OS/2 itself, and uses them to give the user unmatched possibilities for working with his data. Another fine example of this concept is the possibility to print a schedule or phone book by dragging the appropriate Bun to the Desktop printer object, without the need to open the application itself.

Conclusion
Relish is a fast, reliable and very efficient time and information management tool. Just like most other Sundial products, it takes only the best that OS/2 has to offer and builds from there. This level of quality is getting harder to find in OS/2 software these days. Applications like this one are still keeping me from upgrading my hardware after all these years. I've experienced the sluggishness of StarOffice on my system myself and heard the same stories about Lotus SmartSuite. None of this with Relish; it's rock solid, performs like a champion and has everything I've been looking for in this kind of application. There's a demo version available at the Sundial web site. Why not try it today?