Straighten Up All Personal Information

very good
key review info
application features
  • Collect Information Easily
  • (12 more, see all...)

The world of personal information managers has never been an active one, although the importance of this type of software can be crucial for some users. They offer an easy manner to keep your life organized and a good tab on any task completion or the starting of a new one. A PIM or a personal organizer helps you maintain a week's agenda and plan new tasks according to the time left.

Certainly, this kind of software does not generally target just any person and a more hectic life will definitely benefit more from it, but it can be successfully used to set up ambitions and targets, or to trace down the steps for completing a master plan. As you must have realized by now, having a well drawn plan and sticking to it means that the task is half completed.

The options for a personal organizer are various and you can choose between different shapes and colors as well as manners of keeping tabs on your tasks. Milenix's MyInfo could be one candidate in your choice of personal managers. The $49.95 price tag will definitely make it stand out in the crowd, but you have a shot at properly testing it and seeing if it is worth the money. And this money is just for the Standard edition of the application; if you aim higher, for the Professional version (which features portable installation, export to a website and CSV file), prepare to shell out $69.95. The 28 days trial period imposes absolutely no restriction and gives full permission to handle the software for real.

One great advantage of MyInfo is its interface which shares the familiarity of Microsoft Office, thus creating an easy-to-handle environment and appealing to the eyes. Before getting to the creation of new documents and tasks, you have to know that MyInfo works with Topics which contain various single documents.

Creating a new topic can be done in two ways: either from the File menu or from the New option available in the toolbar. The difference is that accessing File menu you will have the possibility of choosing between one of the two pre-defined templates available: Cookbook or Diary, which are already tailored for keeping lists of recipes or keeping a diary. Creating a new topic from toolbar's "New" only allows the creation of a blank topic.

The truth is that you can create a template out of a blank topic with the least effort, but still you will have to make some effort. MyInfo's flexibility is revealed by the fact that it allows creating documents which have sub-documents linked to them. For each item of the topic you can define separate properties in Attributes panel (right part of application window) which covers options for all types of documents.

You can add comments, set sensitivity and priority, include tags, set start and end date/time (for tasks) or add completion level. Certainly, some of the attributes - like creation date, modification date or type of the document - cannot be changed, but you can apply the same values to all the children of a parent document with no effort. And even if that value is grayed out and crying, it cannot be modified, the context menu will provide the necessary options for aligning all documents to a common creation date, for instance.

MyInfo offers quite high standards when working with it, allowing the opening of multiple topics in tabs and switching between them with the utmost ease, thus making the access to multiple documents at once possible. For the most sensitive of the topics the user has the possibility of protecting them with a password restricting the access of unauthorized persons.

Among the features MyInfo can brag about is the incorporation of a web browser endowed with basic functionality. Its functionality proves to be mighty useful especially when working with web documents which contain a link to a web page (the title is a hyperlink which can be opened inside MyInfo). However, the limited functionality of the web browser will be noticed at one point or another, as all you can do is to navigate back and forth in a page, and to a single link. There is no support for tabbed browsing (opening a link in a new window will cause it to open in the default browser) and you only benefit from the basic functionality.

MyInfo is a personal organizer of many talents and, beside the aforementioned ones, it is equipped with three different Paste options. Out of the three, one is the regular feature we all know and use in our daily activity, but the next two are truly something else. AutoPaste function, for instance, allows you to paste into MyInfo directly from another application. That is, the moment you copy a string of text from Notepad, it is immediately pasted in the document currently opened in MyInfo. If an entry is selected, the pasted text is automatically added as a new document.

There is one thing you have to remember, though: using AutoPaste option in MyInfo will cause each paste to be done on a single row. I had to tell you this because I attempted to create a document using only AutoPaste function in MyInfo and copying snippets from other texts. Needless to say the mix did not have the expected result in the application, as each copy operation in a different application translated into a single row in MyInfo.

The second type of Paste available in the application is called "Paste Special" and consists in giving multiple alternatives for pasting the text according to text formatting. Thus you can paste the text completely unformatted, share the formatting of destination text, RTF style or HTML text.

Surely, both of them are amazing, especially AutoPaste, but there is a glitch in its functioning: once started, it will not turn off unless you restart the entire application.

For quickly finding the documents, the application makes available a suite of easy to use filters which can be customized to your liking or you can create one of your own. There are plenty of alternatives for grouping the documents, as well as a great deal of criteria to allow creating filters that will segregate the most accurate results.

The application provides a very intuitive and familiar environment for the user, created around the functionality and ease of use offered by MS Office interface and options. Text can be formatted, adjusted and sized according to user's likes and there are no restrictions in this sense. More than this, tables are handled exactly as in MS Word (split/merge cells, define cells color, insert rows/columns or delete them, etc.).

With an integrated spellchecker (English dictionary only) and various configuration settings, MyInfo proves to be a powerful tool in the field of information management. It allows the creation of sets of documents and rearranging them the way you like it by creating parent-child sets or breaking them up into single standalone documents. Searching by content is a snap because of MyInfo's document indexing solution which makes the result retrieval much faster.

Additional functionality is promoted in MyInfo through the support of creating documents directly from files (TXT, RTF, HTML, BMP, GIF, PNG, JPG or ICO) or possibility of integrating images in documents, just like in MS Word.

The Good

MyInfo comes with many extraordinary functions you cannot find in other software of the same category. Any of its documents support hyperlinks, it comes with a built-in web browser for easier access to user-created web documents, and searching for a certain thing inside a document is amazingly fast.

More sensitive topics can be protected by a user-defined password and configuring the entire application does not require too much effort.

The Bad

All in all, MyInfo makes for a very good PIM, but there are minor glitches that may come as obstacles in the way of its popularity. First of all, the AutoPaste option: as awesome as it is, during our testing, we had to restart the entire application in order to reset it to normal pasting.

The second setback in the case of MyInfo is the price which burns a big hole in the wallet. $49.95 is way over the budget of many users.

The Truth

MyInfo is definitely worth trying and playing around with as it brings the concept of personal information manager closer to the user and it is a good example in this sense.

It uses the familiarity of MS Office interface and the developer boasts about MS Office elements integrating into MyInfo, but unfortunately we could not test these capabilities.

It is very easy to use and extremely flexible, helpful and smooth, but the only thing that may diminish the hype is the price and the minor glitch with AutoPaste function. Anyway, you have 28 days to try the application and make up your mind about the equity of the price.

Here are some snapshots of the application in action:

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user interface 5
features 4
ease of use 5
pricing / value 3


final rating 4
Editor's review
very good