Info Select 7 Review An Entirely Different Outlook Eric Grevstad
Mon 12/2/02 -- The people at Micro Logic Corp. probably don't like to hear their product described as a cult favorite. But then again, how many programs do you know that offer a $10 discount to users of Ecco, the personal information manager (PIM) still cherished by an underground user community since its demise in 1997?
In truth, as we wrote in a January 2002 article, you don't need to be a PIM diehard to be dazzled by Micro Logic's Info Select -- you just need to be willing to think outside the Microsoft Outlook box, or to try a radically different, addictively fast and flexible note-taker, contact manager, appointment calendar, and random data organizer.
Now there's Info Select 7 ($150 as a 5.1MB download, $160 on CD), which polishes a few rough edges and adds even more functions to a package that, given half a chance, might take over your desktop -- or at least save you time and raise your productivity.
Muscle Memory
As we wrote about version 6 in January, Info Select is at heart a free-form database that lets you save typed notes; info from applications, Web sites, or e-mail messages; or other scraps of information as pages in a rearrangeable, expandable, collapsible outline of topics and subtopics.
Items or notes -- or other data types such as spreadsheet grids, database forms with customizable mail-merge fields, and one or more calendars with alarms and recurring appointments -- appear at the right of the screen, with a "selector" pane at the left where you can drag, drop, and click to nest and expand outlines.
You can change a note to a topic or vice versa as you dig up more information; make entries stand out in the selector (even when you collapse their topics) by marking them as to-do items, "hot spots," or pin-ups that stay on top of the screen; and take advantage of myriad import/export options. The former include a special clipboard or lightning-bolt "transporter" icon in the system tray that pastes text highlighted in another program into Info Select; the latter include new and nifty HTML/Javascript export to save topics as clickable outlines or calendars as browsable Web forms.
But Info Select's star attraction remains its lightning-fast retrieval of randomly stashed info: Need all your notes about the Icarus project? Click an icon or just type G for Get, then start typing the first few letters -- by the time you've typed icar, the program has sifted the haystack and retrieved the needles.
Version 7 lets you click a "regular expression" box and enter Boolean search strings such as "Gustav Graves" or icarus, but odds are you'll rarely use the feature -- you'll be content to have all information about a client, his order history, his boss's name, and his kids' birthdays on hand within seconds of answering his phone call.
