And not the 1980’s Eastern Block kind either but more the modern kind that provide performance without the hit to the looks….

I used Outlook on the PC (still do at my other work) and I must admit it does somethings really well, like customisable forms and views. However, the fact that it only really plays well with others via an expensive exchange server set-ups has always been a proverbial pain in the behind in the small office set-ups I have worked in.

I love the fact that Daylite works in a single user set-up but can scale to 50 users (both local and over the internet) without having to add greatly to the complexity of your hardware or software set-ups. Remote workers are catered for extremely well with off-line copies and synchronisation since version 3.5 is lightening fast.

Also anyone who has been stung by outlook creating but not exporting custom fields will understand the need for a real database. Also being a real database it has proper reports. The reporting engine is very powerful but has a little bit of a learning curve.

It has Super Powers

Link anything to anyone or other thing. Daylite makes it easy to see all the tasks and appointments that you have coming up with a key client or all the notes, contacts and organisations attached to a particular project.

This enables a contextual approach to finding data within the application. You can start with the contact, if people are what you remember best, and then find all the information linked to them. Alternatively you can start with the project and easily get all of the email addresses or phone numbers of the businesses and contacts linked to it. You can easily click on an appointment and jump straight to the project it is linked to. Daylite doesn’t force you into one way of thinking, it lets you work your way.

Plays well with others

It has a plug-in for apple mail that ensures that all your correspondence can be easily linked and you can find it in daylite even if you have deleted the email. It also has connectors to accounting programmes MYOB and Moneyworks (we use the latter) and Lightspeed point of sale software. This greatly reduces the amount of data entry that you have to do in a day to day business environment.

Getting Things Done

I have to admit to being a GTD newbie, but I like what I have found out so far. Daylite is easy to set-up for this method of organising your life but powerful and feature rich enough to be able to manage your contacts and projects as well. This is a better solution for me than a pure GTD app as I am always looking at a task like; “call Jim about the site” and then thinking “what’s Jim’s phone number”. Fortunately it is only a click away in Daylite if the linking has been done. This is a huge time saver for me.

Going Mobile

With the iPhone app coming soon, I can’t wait to see how my daylite use evolves even further.

Room to Grow

There are always areas for any software to improve on and Daylite is no exception. It currently can’t do repeating tasks which seems like an elementary oversight. It is also not apple script enabled and does not support automator actions or have a plug-in for quicksilver. It does support fscript but if you are a non programmer like me the thought of learning fscript is a bit daunting, applescript never seemed quite so demanding. This means that I cannot automate the synchronising of databases when I arrive at my home wireless network etc. which would be a wonderful addition (remind me to rave about MarcoPolo sometime soon).

All in all though we love it and use it every day.