Photo Credit: Brian S

This review was first published on May 14, 1995.

Phillipe Kahn has always been a hero of mine! As I entered the world of IBM compatibles in the early 80s as a acne faced teenager, my first conquest in the arena of software was Turbo Pascal. Not only did people call me the wiz when it came to Turbo Pascal, I had adults paying me to create programs for them. I made the decision then that computers were pretty cool . . .

As Turbo Pascal grew, so did Phillipe and his company Borland. Borland soon offered other languages, yes I actually bought TurboProlog, and then they moved to applications. Anyone remember Sprint? This had to have been th best DOS word processor ever created. I swear Borland still uses this to document their programs. Anyway, Borland's first application/utility was something called Sidekick. It brought a new acronym to our computing language called TSR, terminate stay resident.

Sidekick would actually remain in your memory after loading! This meant you could pop it up in the middle of Sprint or dBase II without having to quit and reload the program! When you did pop Sidekick up, you had access to a phone directory, scheduler, calculator and even, yes everyone needs one, an ASCII table! Sidekick remained on everyone's must buy list for years.

As time marched on, other products came to dominate the world Sidekick used to reign over. Borland lumbered like a giant into the Windows application world and quickly lost sight of the useful tool it left back in the DOS world. Fast forward a few years later and you'll see that Borland has sold almost all their applications off, Phillipe no longer calls the day to day shots and Sidekick has been sold to small startup company called Starfish Software. Started up by Phillipe himself.

Starfish's main focus is on delivering simple, high-quality, software products. To this end, note that Sidekick ships on 1 diskette, only uses 3 megabytes of hard drive space and is lightning quick!

The latest Sidekick has three main sections -- cardfile, calendar and notes. These three sections are about as simple as any designer could make them. Anyone with just a passing knowledge on how to use a mouse can be up and running inside Sidekick in minutes.

As you start to use Sidekick you notice everything you do is just like you thought it would be. To create an appointment with someone, all you have to do is click on their name from the card file and drag it over to the calendar section. Same with deleting information. Click on what you want to delete and drag it onto the trashcan.

Some of the newer features of Sidekick catch the others in the game and knock them out! Some of the neater new features:

Alarms work even if you are out of Sidekick! 70 templates for printing reports, envelopes, etc! Balloon help that only activates when you need it! Global find and replace features!

There was only one very disappointing feature of Sidekick 2.0. It won't covert your 1.X data files. You need to do this MANUALLY! Ugh!

Everyone needs a personal information manager nowadays. Why go with a bloated, over priced resource hog? Why not go with a slim, styled, easy to use package like Sidekick for Windows?

Starfish Software
245 Mt. Hermon Rd. Suite 313
Scotts Valley, CA  95066
(408) 439-0942
CompuServe: GO SIMPLIFY
WWW: http://www.simplify.com

Photo Credit: Daniel Buswell

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My husband often likes to remind me of the many times in our marriage that I've changed my mind. Changed my mind from 'No I don't need that," to "Yes, I can't live without it." I thought I didn't need a computer, or a cell phone, a laptop, satellite TV, a photo-quality printer, a wireless card, the better digital camera, a bigger memory card, an mp3 jukebox and the list goes on and on. It is during times when my productivity is booming from my new technology devices that dear hubby likes to drop his favorite phrase, "and you thought you didn't need that," with a smuggish smile. Ok ok. I do admit, I like my technology! Give me a week with my new toy and I'm quickly singing its praises! Now I just love hearing about new products and how they're going to help me save time and make my life easier.

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