So I switched to Trillian Basic 3 (free) and uninstalled Yahoo & AOL. I still have gTalk, but I’ll buy Pro soon (adds Video Chat, Jabber/gTalk, GroupWise, Rendezvous, “Identities”, and more).

It’s been great. No annoying Ads taking up screen real estate, no annoying pop-ups at startup, and all my IM contacts in one location. I highly recommend it.

http://www.ceruleanstudios.com/learn/

Trillian™ is a fully featured, stand-alone, skinnable chat client that supports AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo Messenger, and IRC. It provides capabilities not possible with original network clients, while supporting standard features such as audio chat, file transfers, group chats, chat rooms, buddy icons, multiple simultaneous connections to the same network, server-side contact importing, typing notification, direct connection (AIM), proxy support, encrypted messaging (AIM/ICQ), SMS support, and privacy settings.

Without stealing your home page and with no other included software, pop-ups, or spyware, Trillian provides unique functionality such as contact message history, a powerful skinning language, tabbed messaging, global status changes (set all networks away at once), Instant Lookup (automatic Wikipedia integration), contact alerts, an advanced automation system to trigger events based on anything happening in the client, docking, hundreds of emoticons, emotisounds, shell extensions for file transfers, and systray notifications.

5 things I liked…

• Clean interface and easy navigation. Ribbon style menu.
• Tabbed Projects and Tree Hierarchy with sub-folders.
• Reports that are both functional and print ready.
• Multiple Export formats.
• Built-in timer and ability to track/expense time.

The one improvement I would most like to see…

• Rich Text Editor in the Notes.
• Currently totally plain text, so no hyperlinking, indenting, bold, etc…
• TIP – Paste a hyperlink (from the clipboard) into the Attachment field and use the launch icon.

The 1.0.2 release is not quite powerful enough to make it into my daily use programs yet, but I’ll keep it on my radar. When compared to some of the other Task Management Apps out there, it is off to a great start.

Virtuozo also makes Smart ToDo (Task Mgmt), InControl (Win Startup Configs), and OverSpy (PC Surveillance).

You can register for the daily emails here (affiliate link).

The trial period is only 7 days and it adds a watermark to saved output. I haven’t had time yet to make enough notes to write a full review, but I highly recommend trying it out.

The only downside so far is that the acronym soup in some of the template names makes me feel inferior. It’s a good thing they are categorized because I don’t know half of them, but I get more business savvy each time I figure one out. Now I can tell Project Mgmt that we need to create a SIPOC Diagram during the Measure stage of the Six Sigma DMAIC methodology. (which sounds much more professional than “The old way sucks, what’s new and who’s going to figure it all out?”)

It was all very intriguing, but the actual navigation in the program is horrible. You have to right-click for everything. There is no icons to add new forms/items and even the keyboard shortcuts are about navigation instead of creating content. It just took too much time for me to create new items that I couldn’t use it efficiently.

Bubble Planner is a paper-based organizer with most of the input areas being bubble shaped and is based on GTD ideas.

There is a “Peek Inside” link on the left which shows most of the planner pages. They seem to cover most aspects of daily life, with pages for Business, Family, Spiritual, etc…

I especially like the “Discuss With…” form and used to do something similar with 3×5 cards.

Pro/Con…

• Pro = Overall it appears they put a lot of thought into the design and methods.
• Con = I did not see any statements about paper quality to justify the price. Often these systems use high-quality paper and professional printing/ink to entice you not to just create your own copies.