How often do you need to transfer data displayed by a program to create a to-do or a contact item in Outlook or on your PDA? For example, you might go to a travel site, book a flight and then want to create an appointment in your Outlook calendar. …
After many years of being a Windows-only shop we finally acquired a Macintosh: to be precise, a Power Mac G5 with dual 2-GHz PowerPC processors and 1.5G bytes of RAM running Mac OS X Tiger and iLife ’05. Wow. We can see there’s a real danger of becoming a Mac zealot. The system is amazingly fast, beautifully engineered and gorgeous to look at.
What we’d like to know from all of you Mac addicts is what cool tools should we run? We’re interested in IT software and the stuff that’s just plain fun.
Anyway, back to the world of Windows: How often do you need to transfer data displayed by a program to create a to-do or a contact item in Outlook or on your PDA? For example, you might go to a travel site, book a flight and then want to create an appointment in your Outlook calendar.
Sure, you can select the data, copy it to the clipboard, open a new appointment item, paste the data, and then set the date and time fields accordingly. But given that all or most of the data needed to make the appointment is already there, doesn’t this seem like a golden opportunity for automation?
For ages we’ve wanted a tool that would solve this problem and we have finally found one that does the job. Anagram by Textual parses data from selected applications to generate contact items, appointments, notes and to-do list entries.
Installation is trivial. The most challenging part is deciding where to install the program and whether you want Anagram to integrate with Outlook, Palm Desktop (including specific support for Iambic’s Agendus) or Salesforce.com.
To create an item in the target application, you use the mouse or cursor keys to select text and then use the hot key – by default this is Control-C quickly entered twice. Anagram will then parse the selected data using rules the company describes as artificial intelligence to determine what kind of item to make.
If you don’t want the data saved as the type of item that Anagram assumes it to be press Alt-Tab, and a dialog box will appear that lets you select an alternative type.
On the whole, Anagram works well although you should be careful not to include text that might be confusing. For example, Network World’s address at the top of this page confuses Anagram, which correctly creates an Outlook contact item but sets the Full Name field to “Local.”
In fact, if you install Anagram, go to Textual’s own contact page, select its address, “Postal Address: | Textual | PO Box 391215 | Cambridge, MA 02139” (the bars stand for line breaks) and try to make a contact from it, the company’s name is assumed to be “Postal.” “Address” is ignored and “Textual” is taken as the first line of the address.
We asked the publisher “Wazzup?” and they told us that they keep adding refinements to improve Anagram’s parsing abilities. The fact is that despite the occasional goof, Anagram is worth every penny of its $19.95 price tag. Want to use it at home or on your laptop, as well? That will be an extra $6.95, as will simultaneous support for Outlook and Palm Desktop. Textual’s pricing for Salesforce integration is a different model: $6.95 per month.
VisitorVille
Our final soupcon for this week is a tool for visualizing your Web traffic called VisitorVille from World Market Watch.
VisitorVille runs under Windows and shows live data from instrumented Web pages that are monitored by the VisitorVille hosted service or historical data from the log of the monitored Web server.
VisitorVille displays a “SimCity”-like city complete with people and vehicles. Web pages are buildings and masses of visitors coming from the big search engines are shown as buses that drop off visitors. Taxis, fire trucks, armored cars or police cars transport visitors between buildings, and you can choose a specific vehicle type to take visitors to a given building.
This is a remarkable achievement in presenting data, although how effective VisitorVille is in portraying site activity over the long term as compared to other, more conventional Web metrics tools is hard to say. Check it out and let us know what you think.
Opinions to gearhead@gibbs.com and get your fill of Gearheadedness at Gearblog.
