Wednesday, August 23, 2017

Key Project Manager

It took me a little while to get the idea of this straight. Having been familiar with Primavera scheduling packages, this was a new approach.
These days we'd call it a task manager, and at that it seems to touch a point that is omitted by the very popular task manager category today: tasks have durations. We estimate these, then can give 'actuals'. Tracking both against a type category system would allow one to calibrate one's performance at estimating and get better at it.
It also fails to link tasks in a dependency relationship. I wouldn't want anything like P6 here, but to keep track of the mountain of tasks in a live work system (with serious volume) it is essential. Linking to document would also be important.
Those crits made, I like the interface and concept, although, naturally it is nowhere near as elegant or cross-platform/cloud useful like my current tool Pagico.



















Sunday, August 20, 2017

AskSam

This seems to have a single window interface, and relies on its search capability to find entries. It has a type of card file metaphor, but far less useful than Zoot, for example.


Wednesday, August 16, 2017

RFF

RF Flow: a flow charting package that just dipped its toe into the Windows world. I used it quite a lot for work process maps.




Sunday, August 13, 2017

Zephyr

Another of Ward Mundy's great database packages. This was menu driven and could build applications from the menu.

I've only got a demo version...must write to Ward for an unlock so I can further experiment.








Monday, August 7, 2017

InfoSelect

This had to be my favourite package in the late 80s early 90s. It ran as a 'TSR', terminate and stay resident application, so it could be 'popped up' over a foreground program for intermittent use. I've mentioned it before, but here are some screen shots. Note the quirky menu item names.




















Wednesday, August 2, 2017

DataPerfect

An innovative RDMS from WordPerfect. It started life as a data management system for legal practices, I understand.
It has some quite nice ideas.