Took Them Long Enough...

Softmaker is readying a beta of their full-featured word processor for the Pocket PC. The Handheld PC version works now, but it's only really usable with a landscape program. As soon as I see the PPC version go public, I'll post it here. It looks like by the end of the year we'll finally have a mobile word processor that can edit Word files with no conversion, lose no formatting, support tables, outlining, spell check... 'Bout frickin' time...

Protected From Myself

Anyone know how to prevent both Outlook on the PC and Inbox on the Pocket PC from inserting line breaks in emails? Blogger finally got their post-by-mail thing running, but it looks really weird on the page unless I go in an manually remove all the email's line breaks, which kind of defeats the purpose of posting by email in the first place. Is this one of those situations when Microsoft has decided that they know what's best for me, end of discussion?

Okay, Maybe a Cigarillo

Kopsis Engineering has released a new outliner called Streamliner that comes closer than any other Pocket PC app I've seen to the organizational Nirvana that is ShadowPlan on PalmOS. Like Shadow, Streamliner supports different numbering styles and both checkboxes and progress bars that reflect the state of child processes. It goes a step beyond in editing RTF files while retaining structural information about the document (headings).

Unfortunately, this beta of Streamliner falls short in a number of areas as well. While it's quite easy to look up information in Pocket Outlook based on selected text in the outline, there seems to be no way to actually link such data so that if you check off an item in the outline, the linked task would be checked off in Outlook and vice versa. While Streamliner does an admirable job of preserving structural data like headings in RTF files, it completely strips out all presentational data like italics, etc. Nice try, but we need both; it's not an either/or.

For the money ($9.95), Streamliner's a heck of an outliner already. The developer seems responsive to user suggestions, so it may only be a matter of time before Streamliner becomes the app to beat in the Pocket PC outliner market. Streamliner is available at Handango.