OSMO is not an organizer that will do everything for you. I will not sync with your iPhone or your Blackberry. OSMO will not publish your calendar or allow you to drag and drop from one application to another. What OSMO will do is keep track of your calendar, tasks, contacts, and notes. In this article you will learn how to install OSMO and see just what it has to offer.

NOTE: As of this writing, the OSMO website is not responding.

Features

The OSMO PIM offers the following features:

• Calendar
• Tasks
• Contacts
• Notes
• Alarms
• Printing
• Date calculator
• Day notes
• Timeline
• iCal support
• Notification alarms
• GNOME system tray support

And more.

Installing OSMO

Even though the OSMO web site has gone MIA, the application can be found in your distributions’ repositories. So in order to install OSMO you only need follow these simple instructions:

1. Open up your Add/Remove Software tool.
2. Search for “osmo” (no quotes).
3. Mark the results for installation.
4. Click Apply.
5. Sit back and enjoy the progress bar.

Figure 1

Once OSMO is installed you will find the executable menu entry in the Office sub-menu of the Applications menu. Click that entry and the OSMO main window will open (see Figure 1).

With OSMO, what you see is what you get. This is the only window you will need. From here you do everything. And the very first thing you will want to do is to make sure that OSMO runs in the background so, in order to recall your PIM, you only have to click on the OSMO icon in the system tray (the man in the suit with the black hair).

You can find this configuration option in the Options tab. At the bottom of this tab you will see two options:

• Enable System Tray
• Start Minimized

These should both be self explanitory.

Other options (in the General tab) you might want to take care of in the Options tab are:

• Date format
• Time format
• Web browser
• E-mail client

Now there are also sub-tabs for Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, and Notes. Poke around each sub-tab and configure these features to your liking. One configuration that might give you pause is the  “command” options. In the Tasks options you will see an option “Global notification command”. What you can do here is set a command for a task notification. You can get creative here, like using a sound with the “play” command. Whatever you use here, make sure it can be executed from within a terminal window. You could do something like this:

(xmessage -near An OSMO task awaits your attention) &

The above would pop up a small window with the message “An OSMO task awaits your attention” when the reminder hits.

That’s it for the more important options. Now let’s take a look at the heart of OSMO.

Calendar

Figure 2

The OSMO calendar (see Figure 1) offers all the standard features you would expect in a PIM calendar. In order to add a task you only have to right click a date and select Add Task. The creation of a task is very straight forward. Also from this right click menu you can browse Notes, iCal Events, and export to iCal.

As you can see, when you view a particular day in the OSMO calendar it will give you the details of that day as well as showing the days tasks. What I like about this is that it is one of the most uncluttered views of all the PIMs I have tried. You quickly get an idea of what your day is like.

Another nice feature is that when you add a task to your calendar it is automatically created as a task. But what if you just want to add a meeting or office hours? You certainly don’t want all of your appointments to show up as tasks. No. To add non-task entries in your calendar you want to toggle the Day Note panel (Upper right icon in the icon toolbar) and then insert a time line by clicking the small clock icon in the Notes pane (see Figure 3).

Figure 4

When you add a timeline in the Notes you will see the notes pane go from an empty window to a window with a timeline broken into the interval you configure (when you click the Add timeline button).

Now you can add meetings in a more standard way, and without adding them as tasks.

Final thoughts

Although OSMO won’t make the balancing act between work and home a simple, automated task, it will allow you to keep yourself organized in a clean, user-friendly way. And you don’t have to worry about losing calendars on a server, getting bogged down in cumbersome UIs, or lost in feature-bloat.

OSMO is a simple, easy-to-use PIM that will keep you simply organized.

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For most of us (at least for me), that research involves the fun little dance of switching between Microsoft Word and the Internet, constantly reading, writing, losing my place, cursing the world, crying uncontrollably, and then getting back to work. But I digress.

One of the best tools out there, of the many I’ve tried to avoid that vicious cycle, is WebNotes. I use it constantly as a student and a professional, and it offers the most features and best usability of any application out there.

WebNotes, at its most basic, is an annotation tool. The first step is to install the toolbar (which works in Firefox and Internet Explorer), or the bookmarklet (which works in pretty much every browser, but with a couple fewer features). When you visit a website, the WebNotes software lets you can either highlight the text on the page, or make sticky notes with comments on the page. Everything you annotate is automatically added to your WebNotes organizer, for easy access later.

Once you’ve annotated a few pages, check out the WebNotes organizer. From there, you can either see the Web pages in their original form, view your highlights and comments on top of the page, or see only your markups. You can also search through your highlighted text and annotations, which makes finding that killer quote you came across an impressively easy proposition.

You can share notebooks, or individual notes (the organization and filing features of WebNotes make sharing them easy), which makes WebNotes great for collaborating on research within a group. There’s no emailing files necessary, no trying to figure out which version is most up-to-date; instead, all your research lives in one constantly-updated place.

For the more professional users, there’s the ability to create a “Report,” which is a well-designed aggregation of all your notes and highlights on a given subject. I’ve used it for giving presentations, or just summarizing research to someone else – it’s much more useful than I initially thought it would be.

The bottom-line of WebNotes is that it streamlines all your research. One, everything goes into one place, meaning there’s no hunting through twelve different Word documents to find what you want. Two, there’s no copy and paste – just highlight or comment, and everything gets saved automatically. The best thing about WebNotes, though, is that it lets you avoid the inevitable hunt through a page you know is useful, but that you can’t for the life of you figure out why.

A few weeks ago, WebNotes launched a “Pro” version, which adds some serious functionality to WebNotes. The biggest update, at least in my own use, is that WebNotes Pro lets you highlight and comment on PDF files. Particularly in school, I do a ton of reading PDF’s, and hate changing between the PDF and Word constantly so I can take notes. With WebNotes, that’s all avoided, and PDF markups go right into my organizer. (If you love the idea of PDF markup, but don’t want to use all that WebNotes has to offer, give Foxit Reader a look – it’s got all the markup love you could want.)

The Pro version also offers better support, and Multi-Color highlighting. It’s aimed squarely at professionals and students who do a lot of research from a lot of different sources, and WebNotes wants to be the source for all your research and informational bookmarking. For me, personally, it’s become indispensable in both cases.

The Pro version costs $9.99/month, but there’s a 50% discount for students who use the promo code “student101″. For gHacks readers, however, there’s an even better deal:

3 FREE months of the full, WebNotes Pro interface. The first 50 people to click this link will get three months free of the Pro features, to test to your heart’s content.

If you don’t want the added features (and the price tag), you’ll be reverted to the free version of WebNotes – which is pretty great itself – after three months is up.

What do you think of WebNotes? Is there a better application out there?

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For some time however I did use Essential PIM and found it a good solid organisation tool. You can think of Essential as Outlook without email capabilities, which is actually useful for anyone who uses Gmail for most of their email.

The interface is actually pretty good, clean, polished and functional, which is a lot more then I can say for a lot of the organisational software I’ve seen. In fact it’s got such a nice interface you cant help but want to use it.

Essential PIM has 4 main functions:

* Schedule
* To Do
* Contacts
* Notes

It’s all very easy to use and intuitive, with the scheduling being particular efficient and easy to use. Data from other applications can be imported into Essential PIM including TXT, RTF and CSV as well as exported from Essential into other applications.

Another strong point is the ability to run the application from a USB stick, something I also used to do.

Essential PIM is a freemium product, for a reasonable fee you can upgrade to the pro product for some additional features including encryption, automatic backup, synchronisation with Outlook and better file sorting features.

Even just for the Contacts database this program is great and very easy to use, I recommend it.

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As with every Personal Information Manager Total Organizer combines a calendar, an organizer, a to-do list, notebook and contact management software. Total Organizer uses a tree view that contains categories and subcategories with all those information. A category work could for instance contain different project subcategories each with their own calendar, notes, to-do list and contacts.

The main category combines all information from its subcategories which is important for the schedule obviously. The root category finally contains all information from all categories offering an overview of all activities, notes, contacts and the like.

Keywords can be assigned to every information that is being added to Total Organizer which can be helpful when searching for specific information. Popup reminders can be enabled as well. The application uses less than 7 Megabytes which is pretty good for an organizer.

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