.FLYINGHEAD PRODUCT REVIEW
.TITLE Organize lists like a pro with ListPro (and also organize your movies)
.AUTHOR Heather Wardell
.SUMMARY If you’re looking for a flexible list manager, you can’t go wrong with ListPro. In this article, Heather Wardell reviews ListPro, discusses some of the minor quirks, and then we shift left to discuss Movie Collector, a powerful movie organizing program that nicely integrates with ListPro.
.OTHER
I’ve been using an older list management program for years, so when I started working on this review of the ListPro list and information manager, I expected to give it a quick trial and go back to my old way of tracking tasks and other list-type information. Instead, I’ve found a new way.
.H1 Installation and first use
The installation of the Windows PC and Palm versions of the software went smoothly. At the end of the Windows install, the program opened a "Getting Started" guide, which contained a lot of useful information, clearly presented, about how to use ListPro. The guide actually contained more information than I realized; there are text links to "Previous" and "Next" on some of the screens, but I didn’t notice them at first.
After looking over the demo lists, I decided to create a new list. Being used to a program that stores each list in its own file, I attempted to create a new file. ListPro displayed the screen shown in Figure A, one of the clearest error/information screens I’ve ever seen in a software program, to let me know that I was already synchronizing with a specific file. When I cancelled the wizard, it popped up again unexpectedly, but it did go away after the second cancel.
.FIGPAIR A ListPro’s screens are clearly written and informative.
To create a new list, you can click the "Quick List" button to create a basic checklist, or use one of the existing templates. You can also download an existing list from the Ilium Software Web site, most of which are reference guides or lists of television show episodes.
.TEASER Get organized. Tap here to read the rest.
Creating your own list is the most flexible, as you can choose what kinds of fields to include and in what order, but the templates can be modified as well. Strangely, when I asked the software to create a list from its templates, it reported that it couldn’t locate the template file. As I allowed it to install in its default folder, I can’t see why it was unable to locate the file. There is a menu item (which the software did tell me about) to choose the template file. I located it, in the default install folder, and had no further difficulties.
.H1 My ‘trip preparation’ lists
My review of ListPro came at a good time for me, as I’m preparing for a conference across the country in a few days. ListPro worked exactly as I’d expected, and I had my list of things to do put together in short order. Figure B shows the list on my desktop on the left and on my Treo on the right. The column sizes are adjustable, and I’ve moved mine to hide part of the date to give me more room to see the task names.
.FIGPAIR B Lists are neatly displayed on both the PC and Palm screens.
.H1 Synchronization
As always with an application that has records, I worry that my information won’t be synchronized properly. ListPro promises record-level synchronization, so that I could, say, change one task’s date on the Palm and check off a different task on the desktop, and it delivers.
Changing the same record on both platforms results in the last change being kept. This makes sense, but I would have liked to be informed when I synchronized that I had changed both records, as if I’d done it accidentally I would have lost information.
.H1 Other features
The software allows creating live links in a list item, which can take you to a Web site or allow you to dial a phone number or send an email. Creating a Web site link worked fine for me, but I wasn’t able to make the other two happen.
My laptop doesn’t have a modem so it can’t dial, but it should have been able to send an email. Whenever I clicked an email link, though, I got an error message that Windows couldn’t find the specified file. My Treo didn’t see the links as links, so it wasn’t able to dial or send an email either.
I had more success with the alarm functionality. Once you enable alarms for a particular list, the desktop will alert you when tasks are due. The Palm does not display the alarms. As my lists are primarily reference ones, I’m not sure how often I’d use this feature, but if you’re frequently at your computer and need to be reminded to complete certain tasks, it would be useful.
List items can have a note field attached, and this note field can include text formatting, links, and images. At least, it can as long as you’re not synchronizing to a Palm handheld. I created a test file that wasn’t synchronized to my Palm, and the note field formatting worked as expected.
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.H1 Overall opinion
With the exception of the live link feature, I found ListPro to be exceptionally solid. It isn’t particularly flashy, but the implementation is strong and it does exactly what it promises.
ListPro’s rating is four out of five.
.RATING 4
.H1 Editor’s note about Movie Collector and ListPro
ListPro also integrates nicely with the Collectorz series of library programs. We’ve had the Collectorz Movie Collector program in-house for review for quite some time and haven’t had the chance to devote a full review to it. For anyone with a large DVD (or Blu-Ray collection) Movie Collector is exceptional.
Movie Collector also [[http://www.collectorz.com/movie/listpro.php|nicely integrates with ListPro]], which is why we’re mentioning it here. If you do want to use ListPro with Movie Collector, there’s a special discount the two companies offer.
Our only complaint about Movie Collector is that the format seems to change from version to version, which means there’s always something of a challenge trying to open up an already-configured movie collection. Beyond that, the product is extremely complete and quite helpful to use. We give Movie Collector a four out of five as well.
.RATING 4
.BEGIN_SIDEBAR
.H1 Product availability and resources
Learn about [[http://www.iliumsoft.com/site/lp/listpro.php|ListPro]].
Learn about Movie Collector [[http://www.collectorz.com/movie/|Movie Collector]].
Learn about [[http://www.collectorz.com/movie/listpro.php|how Movie Collector integrates with ListPro]].
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.BIO
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http://www.collectorz.com/movie/
