Not many software packages reach the eve of their 20th anniversary. Most are sold, absorbed by another, or fade into abandonware.
This puts EssentialPIM among the elite of personal organizers as we close in on 2025, two decades from its debut. The user community is vibrant, development is steady, and more features await.
More than 60 modifications to EPIM appeared in 2024, spread across two major (12.0 and 12.1) and ten minor releases.
We'll review a few of these here to represent the team's effort in 2024 to make EPIM an even more effective organizer.
Frequent functions brought to the fore
Frequent activities, such as handling email messages or entering new items, have been made more accessible throughout the program.
One example (Figure 1) is the four quick actions that appear when you hover over a message in Vertical View (in Groups). Without hunting for buttons or toolbar icons, you can flag a message for follow-up (which creates an entry in the Tasks module), toggle it starred/unstarred and read/unread, or delete.
Similarly, replying to or forwarding a message are quick actions in the header of a message preview.
Figure 1. Four quick actions appear when your cursor hovers over a message (top). Replying to, or forwarding, a message is also available in the message header in preview mode (bottom).
Adding an item in prior versions required opening its associated dialog. Beginning with Tasks in v11.5, a "quick add" entry that skips the dialog was extended to the top line in all modules in v12.0 (Figure 2).
Figure 2. When you have minimum details, the quick add feature in all modules saves opening, completing, and closing the new item dialog.
Other features streamlined and modernized
Besides introducing quick actions, the new releases have revamped several functions. We'll look at adding a calendar and managing tags as examples.
To add a calendar in prior versions, you were required to bring up the context menu and right-click on the calendar list (Figure 3). EPIM v12.1 adds a one-click shortcut in the calendar list that includes options besides adding a calendar (Figure 4). The Add Calendar dialog has also been redesigned, bringing a color palette to the foreground.
Figure 3. To add a calendar before v12.1 was a 2-step process: right-click for the context menu and click on add for the new calendar dialog.
Figure 4. A shortcut in the calendar list reduces the steps to one.
The Tags Explorer has been refreshed to reduce keystrokes and mouse clicks (Figure 5). Search functions have been consolidated (#1) and buttons to add/edit/delete tags bring to the forefront actions from the context menu (#2).
Figure 5. The redesigned Tags Explorer consolidates search functions (bottom, #1) and features buttons to manage tags more easily (#2).
More ways to see your information
A personal organizer slips from helpful to exasperating when data is hard to find or see. This isn't likely to happen to EPIM, which continues to expand ways of getting to your information.
Extensive options to view appointments have been added to the week, month, and year filters in the Agenda view of the Calendar (Figure 6). You can now select the number of days, weeks, or months. You can further organize your appointments with new options in the filter (#4) and layout (#5) buttons.
Other views added in 2024 include:
- Passwords: A new default, Vertical View (Entries).
- Contacts: A new default, featuring initials or pictures to simplify finding the right contact.
Finally, you can create templates for custom views to retain column attributes such as availability, width, order, and sorting for the Calendar, Tasks, Contacts, and Mail modules.
Figure 6. The Agenda View in Calendar, which displays appointments in a spreadsheet-like grid, offers numerous new ways to filter the records.
Responsiveness remains a mainstay
I wrote in the opening that EPIM enjoys a vibrant community of users. This, and the developers' commitment to the product, contribute to its ongoing success.
Users frequently commend the development team for engaging the community, and features like the following two are the reason.
EssentialPIM has a suite of free tools that users said was difficult to find. In response, links to the tools and to previous versions of EPIM were added to the Help menu in v12.0.1 (Figure 7).
Figure 7. When users said they had trouble finding the free tools that complement EssentialPIM, links were added to the Help menu in v12.0.1.
A new option to disable editing the subject of email messages (Figure 8) generated a flurry of messages after it appeared in EPIM v12.0.3. Once the concerns became clear, the developers issued another minor release two days later.
Figure 8. Before v12.0.3, users could edit the subject of email messages, sometimes making unwanted changes. A new Mail option allows you to disable this feature.
To be sure, the path has had its share of potholes. The forum lit up with numerous defects reported following the release of v12.0 in May. A series of minor releases (12.0.1–12.0.6) followed in June through September. The response of the development team earned kudos (Figure 9).
Figure 9. The latest major release of EssentialPIM earned kudos during beta testing following a bumpy series of minor releases to v12.0.
More to come
The coming year promises to bring more updates. Among features in the plans, although when they will be released has not been decided, are adding spreadsheet functionality, introducing skins to allow users to customize EPIM's appearance, and opening modules as separate windows within the EssentialPIM main program.