One of the top items on my shopping list for the recent RISC OS London Show was the latest release of !Organizer. This is now at version 2.26 and maintained/developed for the last few years by Martin Avison.
 
!Organizer is one of my favourite RISC OS applications, and I love the flexible display modes. I have to use Google Calendar at work, and I find !Organizer much more flexible. A monthly view is fine until you get to the end of the month and suddenly find some surprises as the months roll on.
 
The 2 week rolling view in !Organizer makes it very easy to plan and organise my life and be ontop of my up-coming schedule. This has been enhanced in recent releases with the planner and 4/8 week rolling displays. ICal compatability also makes it very easy to import existing Calendars and lists of public holidays,etc available on the Internet.
 
Recent releases have seen small tweaks to !Organizer, which is no bad thing with a mature piece of software. It is already very configurable, and you can skin the softwarre to look exactly as you like. The guys at BaseCamp are rightly scathing on their blog about over-designing and cluttering up software with new features which make the product more cluttered and less usable.
 
So, what are the new features in 2.26? The headline feature is the ability to encrypt data with a password. Now that you can more easily share data and store the data on Cloud servers, it is good to see security options on what is critical and personal data. This feature is very flexible so you can encrypt some of the data (like your addresses) or everything. 2.26 also brings some tweaks to the Notes section and some bug fixes.
 
The upgrade is available from 2.24 for 20 pounds or from 2.23 (or the version on PiNut) for 30 pounds. If you have a version earlier than 2.24, this added some very interesting features to interact with Sine Nomine's OSM Mapping software to make it very easy to produce maps from your address book with a single click.
 
One of the great things about the shows is the chance to talk to the developers, who were very actively asking for idea and feedback. I suggested that there is still room for improvement in the Notes tools (which feels clunky compared to newer tools like Trello).
 
I would also like to see !Organizer able to send out emails to remind about events if a Mail client is available - this is one very good feature in Google Calendar.
 
It would also be useful to have more ability to create groups. At the moment I use Green for Personal and Blue for Work events and it would be nice to be able to define them better. If you have some ideas, the developers would love to hear from you....
 
If you are an existing user of !Orangaizer, you will be pleased to see the continued polish and maintenance of the software. If you are not a user, and looking for a small, polished and perfectly formed organizer, we recommend you take a look.
 
Organizer website