Entering a field as crowded as the personal information manager (PIM) market requires a great deal of confidence on Claris’s part. On the one hand, there are already many competitors, some long established, such as Adobe’s TouchBase Pro and DateBook Pro, Now Software’s Now Up-to-Date and Now Contact, and Portfolio Software’s Day-to-Day package (formerly Dynodex). On the other hand, Claris has had the opportunity to build on the features of these programs; Claris Organizer is a remarkably polished first release.
Organizer is an all-in-one PIM that includes modules for Calendar, Contacts, Tasks, and Notes. The program has a floating button palette that lets you access each module’s window. Organizer is a single-user product; it can’t be opened and shared by multiple simultaneous users, as can Now Up-to-Date and TouchBase Pro. Claris Organizer gets by with only 1.2MB of RAM, despite being a RAM-based program. Because the data is in RAM, performance is good. Sorts and searches occur almost immediately.
Organizer’s Calendar module provides separate Weekly, Monthly, and Daily Agenda views, as well as a Navigator window that enables you to quickly jump to any past or future date. Each view has arrow buttons that let you move forward or backward in time; in addition, the Daily and Weekly views have plus and minus buttons that control how many days or weeks you can view at one time. The Daily view window is split horizontally into two panes. The top pane shows your appointments, and the bottom pane displays the day’s tasks. The Monthly view, unfortunately, doesn’t allow you to create banners that span several days, for denoting business trips or other longer events. You can drag events to move them between days, but you can’t option-drag events to copy them from one day to another.
The other three modules — Contacts, Tasks, and Notes — can each display a list view and an individual detail window. Each contact record can handle two sets of addresses, four telephone numbers, and four customizable fields. Tasks (what some programs call to-dos) have five priority levels and, like appointments, can be onetime or recurring. You can also set alarms for tasks or appointments.
The feature that sets Claris Organizer apart from most other personal information managers is its intelligent assistance. Like some programs, Organizer has several data entry aids for entering contacts. The program has pop-up menus with common entries for most fields, such as Title, State, and phone labels. It also automatically completes a field based on the first few keystrokes.
Claris Organizer has the ability to attach any item to any other item. It’s easy to attach a contact to an event, or a note to a contact. Items with attachments have a small paper-clip icon next to them. Clicking on the paper clip displays a popup menu with a list of the attachments. Of the several ways to attach items, the best is drag and drop. It’s simple to associate coworkers with a meeting: just drag the coworkers’ names from the contact list onto the appointment in your calendar. Once you attach people to an event, it’s a snap to contact any of them. You can also drag items to any of the module buttons in the palette. These items are intelligently named, so that, for example, if you drag an appointment called “Breakfast Meeting” onto the Note button in the palette, you get a new attached Note named “Note regarding Breakfast Meeting.” If you drag Bob’s name from the contact list onto the Task button, you create a “Call Bob” task.
Claris Organizer’s assistance really shines with its Auto-Attachments feature. If you enter “Dinner with Bob,” the program attaches Bob to the appointment. If your contact list has more than one person named Bob, Organizer pops up a list of all the Bobs, and you choose which one to attach.
Viewing and sorting information in Claris Organizer is adequate but could be improved. You can easily select a list of contacts within a particular category, but there’s no simple way to select all contacts except that category, or to select and mark contacts in one step. You can sort on only two fields at a time and only in ascending order.
Claris Organizer lacks a feature found in most of its more recent rivals: an extension that allows quick menu-bar access to Organizer from within all other programs. Now Contact’s QuickContact pioneered this idea, and it was followed by the Adobe and Portfolio products. Such easy, universal access to your contacts and calendar is becoming an expected standard for PIMs, and I hope that Claris Organizer will add this feature in the next revision.
The Organizer manual, which consists mainly of a tutorial, is surprisingly skimpy and even lacks an index. The online help included with the program is considerably more detailed and useful.
Claris Organizer does a good job of printing lists or the detail information from all modules, and it can print envelopes, fax cover sheets, and labels. The program comes with several Avery-label templates and lets you specify a start location when printing labels, so that you can reuse partially used label sheets. Contacts and calendars can be printed (double-sided, if desired) in several day-planner formats, but some are less useful than others. The compact day-planner size (4.25 by 6.75 inches, used by Filofax, Day Runner, and others) prints poorly; the printed address-book and calendar pages are a bit too big and print two across a sheet of letter-size paper. Other programs size their pages correctly and fit three compact day-planner pages on each 8.5-by-11-inch sheet.
The Last Word
With the excellent integration of the four modules and the program’s intelligent assistance, Claris Organizer is a worthy competitor in the PIM market. In its first release, it lacks some features that other products boast, but none of these are egregious omissions. In its present version, Organizer won’t tempt most longtime PLM users to switch. But new PIM users, lured by the low price, good performance, and ease of use, will probably find that Organizer meets their requirements. With such a strong foundation, Claris Organizer just needs to grow up a bit in the next version to become a major player.
Negrino, Tom. (January 1995). Claris Organizer. Macworld. (pg. 61).
Claris Organizer 1.0 
Claris Corporation
Applications
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28 / 
2020-09-15 / 
01d9bf78ae29f5dc9ab4fc9068cba57d98d265c4 / 
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Claris_Organizer_1.0_800k.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
