Pocket Informant 3.

0
Quick Start Guide
This quick start guide is designed as a guide to help you get acquainted with version
3.0 . For convenience, this guide is broken up into two sections: New Users, Current
(Pocket Informant 2) Users.
Pocket Informant 3.0 Quick Start Guide 1
Section 1: New Users
Minimum Requirements: iOS 5 or better
As a rst time user you recognize that Pocket Informant is a very powerful and very
exible application that will bring a new level of management to your events, tasks,
notes, and contacts. Congratulations on your choice!
The Setup Assistant
When you rst launch, you will will be presented with the Setup
Assistant. This assistant walks you through some of the most
basic options that Pocket Informant offers and lets you setup
where your data comes from.
Pocket Informant can show events and tasks from the internal
iOS Calendar and iOS Reminders. Pocket Informant also syncs
with a number of popular services: Google (Calendar and Task),
Toodledo, Evernote, or Pocket Informant Online. If you use
Exchange, you most likely will use the native iOS event/
Reminder support or use Outlook to sync to Pocket Informant
Online. More info on Exchange support with PI Online below.
If you skip the assistant, by default Pocket Informant simply enables iOS events and
Reminders. You can always manually add sync accounts or customize Pocket Informant
in more detail by going to the Settings tab (on iPhone, the Settings tab will be on the
second page of the tab bar).
Pocket Informant 3.0 Quick Start Guide 2
User Interface
Pocket Informants interface is designed around the simple idea that you want
direct access to your events, tasks, notes, and contacts without having to go
through a lot of levels or menus. Each tab takes you directly to your calendar,
task list, note list, or contacts.
The tab bar (at the bottom of the screen for iPhone and on the right side for
iPad) lets you switch between the different views. On the iPhone swipe the
tab bar to move between the two pages of tabs. The tab bar is also capable
of three different modes: icon only, text only or icon + text. On the iPhone you
swipe up on the tab bar to cycle through the different modes; on the iPad you
swipe to the left.
We also provide a Navigation View which gives you more functionality such
as ltering, calendar navigation, and more. Access the Navigation View by
tapping on the three line button on the top left of the screen.
On iPhone, the navigation view slides over your current view and then
disappears when you make your selection. On iPad you have the choice of
showing the Navigation View permanently in landscape or hiding it for more
usable screen space.
Useful tips
Swiping on tasks, events, notes, voice notes, and contacts will reveal a set of actions
that you can perform with that item.
Tasks View lets you tap/hold on a task to drag and drop it between different groupings.
Day View lets you drag and drop events or tasks.
Day View supports showing multiple days by pinching the screen horizontally;
pinching vertically increases or decreases the time points shown.
When creating a new Task or Event, can type in a natural English phrase, such as
Lunch with Joe noon tomorrow at Chilis or Soccer Practice every Thursday 6pm to
8pm and Pocket Informant will understand and pre-ll the different elds in the editor
for you.
Pocket Informant 3.0 Quick Start Guide 3
Swiping to the left on a the title eld of an event or task editor will turn off the English
Language Parsing; swiping to the right will give you a full screen text editor that you
can use to type out long titles.
When you are on the Today tab, if you tap the Today tab again, it will let you toggle
between Today and Tomorrow
When you are on the Calendar tab and you swipe to a future or previous date, you can
tap the Calendar tab again to jump back to Today
Backup and Support
You can backup your Pocket Informant data directly to Dropbox (in Advanced Settings),
by syncing your data to the supported sync services, or the built-in Backup manager to
manually create backups and email them to yourself (also in Advanced Settings).
(NOTE: iOS Reminders, Events and Contacts are not backed up by Pocket Informant)
If you happen to encounter any difculty with the application, check out our support
website rst. We have a great Knowledge Base that you can search, automated
troubleshooting guides, and, of course, if you dont nd the answer youre looking for,
our support staff stands ready and willing to assist you - simply submit a ticket. In
addition to all that, we also have very active and helpful user forums. We do not
recommend uninstalling as a rst troubleshooting step. In most cases its an
unnecessary step and the uninstall process will delete all your backup les and logging
information.
Evernote Sync
Pocket Informant 3.0 for iOS adds Evernote Sync to our large list of sync providers.
Evernote makes it easy to remember things big and small from your everyday life using
your computer, phone, tablet and the web.
What we sync
Pocket Informant 3.0 currently syncs Notebooks, Notes, Tags, and attachments such as
PDFs, images, audio notes, Ofce docs, and more. Notebooks are synced as Pocket
Informant Projects. Attachments are read-only in that while Pocket Informant supports
for viewing/printing from Evernote we do not as yet support attaching these to existing
notes within Pocket Informant. Such support is forthcoming.
Tags are synced down from Evernote. We do not sync deletions of tags from Evernote
at this time because tags are a Universal object that can be used in all our sync types.
Also we've had some requests to only sync tags that are actually used by a note from
Evernote. We are considering those requests for the future.
What we don't sync
We do not yet sync stacks. We expect to add support for stacks shortly.
Limitations
We currently only allow one Evernote account to sync to. The Evernote authentication
mechanism we use only supports one authentication per app.
Pocket Informant 3.0 Quick Start Guide 4
Pocket Informant's rich text editor is very powerful but there are a couple things we don't
yet support:
Tables
Todos
We will not be supporting tables for some time. Any note synced down with a table
within it will be marked as "Read Only" within Pocket Informant so as not to destroy data
in Evernote. You can always open the note in Evernote from within Pocket Informant
(there is an Action button to do so).
Todos will be supported in a later version of Pocket Informant.
Pocket Informant 3.0 Quick Start Guide 5
Section 2: Previous Users
Interface
If you are a current or previous user of Pocket Informant, the rst thing that you will
notice about Pocket Informant 3.0 is a brand new interface. We call this interface Clear
and we think youll love it!
Youll notice that on the iPhone, many of the more powerful navigation tools have been
moved into what we call the Navigation View. Access the Navigation View by tapping
on the three line button on the top left of the screen.
On iPhone, the navigation view slides over your current view and then disappears when
you make your selection. On iPad you have the choice of showing the Navigation View
permanently in landscape or hiding it for more usable screen space.
You may also notice that some interface elements that youve grown used to are now
hidden (such as the icons on Event and Task cells, or the Project & Context bubbles on
Task cells). Event, Task and Note cells are now fully customizable - you can enable or
disable these different UI elements by going to the Settings tab, then to Appearance ->
Event/Task/Note Layout.
Finally version 3.0 uses a new application-wide font chosen to help improve readability.
However if you prefer to use the iOS system font you may do so by going to the
Settings tab, then to Appearance -> and choosing the system font.
Today View
We now support showing both Today and Tomorrow in the Today View. You can also
customize the order and appearance of all the different sections that the Today View
supports. In addition Smart Filters can be added to the Today View.
Go to the Settings tab, then to Today View to make your customizations.
Natural Language Parsing
When creating new events or tasks, you will notice the title eld will glow blue. This
indicates that Natural Language Parsing is on (English only). When Natural Language
Parsing is on, you can still type in just a title if you wish, however you can also enter a
phrase such as:
Pocket Informant 3.0 Quick Start Guide 6
Pickup groceries every friday 6pm at Krogers
or
Lunch with Joe next monday at Chilis
and Pocket Informant will automatically ll out the various elds for you. Try it - its really
fun! You can nd more information about how to use Natural Language Parsing here.
For pieces of text that you dont wish to be used by the parser, just wrap that text in
brackets - {} or []. You can also swipe to the left to turn off the parsing or to turn it back
on again. If your locale is not English, parsing is off by default. You can turn it on by
swiping left on the text eld.
Notes
Weve added two exciting enhancements to notes in Version 3. First, you now have
rich text notes - complete with the ability to use different font styles, colors, sizes,
create ordered & unordered lists, etc. Secondly, Pocket Informant can now sync with
Evernote. We support rich text notes for Pocket Informant Online, Evernote, and
Toodledo - according to each respective sync providers abilities. For example Toodledo
only supports some basic styles and lists, while Evernote supports fonts, lists, images,
attachments, and more.
We also support rich text notes for events and tasks, however for sync services that
dont support rich text - such as iOS events and Google - the notes show up as raw
HTML. You can use plain text notes instead if you prefer.
Weather
We are excited to add support for current weather conditions and forecasts to Pocket
Informant as a one time in-app purchase. Visit the Informant Store by going to the
Settings tab for more information. Weather information is provided by Weather
Underground.
Tasks
You can now show, hide, or reorder which task lters show up in our tasks screen.
Additionally, while editing the order and visibility of each lter, you can tap on a given
lter to choose if that lter should show Completed Tasks or not.
We also no longer have an explicit GTD task mode. Instead we have moved that
functionality from a global setting into a per-project setting. When you create or edit a
project, set its Next Action Property to Sequential to mimic GTD mode. Alternatively,
set it to Parallel to mimic Standard mode. Sequential mode means that Pocket
Informant allows only one next action at a time for this project and when that task is
complete, the next action ag automatically moves to the next task in the list. Parallel
mode means that you can have multiple next action tasks and its up to you to manually
manage them. In addition to both of those modes, theres also a new Single Action
mode where you have a project full of single actions (i.e. there are no next actions).
This is useful for miscellaneous projects.
Pocket Informant 3.0 Quick Start Guide 7
Projects now also have many other new features such as due dates, default templates,
and the ability to auto-complete when you mark the last task as completed.
Exchange/Outlook Sync
Pocket Informant 3.0 supports the native iOS event/Reminders for access to Exchange
data. The main disadvantage to this setup is the lack of access to Notes and categories.
To synct his additional data, we suggest using a combination of Pocket Informant Online
and a third party product called gSyncIt from Fieldston Software. gSyncIt is a software
package that installs as a plugin to Outlook on your desktop. It will sync your data from
Outlook to our online subscription service.
In prior versions of Pocket Informant we supported a form of direct Outlook sync called
WDS. Version 3.0 does not support WDS as it was not up to our standards for
reliability and ease of use. Due to the nature of how it worked, it often required opening
rewall ports, managing other security software, and without advanced network
congurations, you were not able to perform a sync unless your device was on the
same network as your Outlook machine. By transitioning to an online sync service,
those complexities and limitations are no longer a factor.
More
There are many other new features within Pocket Informant 3 (such as template titles,
sync account nicknames, and checklists). We think this is, by far, our best release of
Pocket Informant yet. Enjoy!
Pocket Informant 3.0 Quick Start Guide 8