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The Full Monty, Part 2: Spb Software House’s Spb Diary

One of the most popular Today plugins is Spb Software House’s Pocket Plus. Actually, this application isn’t just a Today plugin; it enhances and replaces system functionality across the device. One thing it doesn’t do, though, is display your calendar data on the Today screen. For that, Spb offers a companion program, Spb Diary.

Hey, this looks familiar…

The first thing you’ll notice after installing Spb Diary is how much it looks like SBSH’s PocketBreeze. This isn’t by accident. These two similarly-named and geographically distant (SBSH is Israeli, Spb is Russian) companies compete fiercely in the “tricking out your Pocket PC” market and their offerings match up against each other so well it’s spooky. I haven’t seen an “anything you can do, I can do better” competition like this since the heyday of Agendus vs DateBk on the Palm. Since PocketBreeze got there first, it seems only fair to use it as the measuring stick against which to measure Spb Diary, and it does some things better, some worse.

Spb Diary defaults to vertical tabs, although with a little help from Pocket Plus, you can opt for horizontal instead if that’s what you want. More on that later. The Calendar tab displays each day in turn starting from today, shows status bars to the left of each appointment and scrolls within its own space on the Today screen, all just like PocketBreeze (although unlike PocketBreeze, Spb Diary is smart enough to auto-size to take up as much space as it can without creating a scrollbar; nice). Spb Diary provides a time bar for each day so you get a graphical view of your commitments, although unlike PocketBreeze there’s not way to specify the time range you want to see, so I’m stuck looking at the time I’m asleep from midnight to 6am whether I want to or not. As of the new 2.0 release, Spb Diary is also just as controllable one-handed via the d-pad as PocketBreeze. So far, it’s a coin flip between them.

Unlike PocketBreeze, Spb Diary lacks some of the formatting flexibility I’d like. Particularly, you can’t move the unread messages and undated tasks under today’s header, meaning that you sometimes have to scroll down to see your next appointment. Not good. Spb Diary is skinnable, but there aren’t anywhere near as many skins available. And most damning, Spb Diary lacks the ability to roll other Today screen plugins into itself as extra tabs. No tabs! Denied!

Sounds like a clear win for PocketBreeze, right? Not so fast!

Here’s looking at you…

It turns out that Spb Diary has a lot of advantages over the competition. First off is the Contacts tab. PocketBreeze doesn’t even have a Contacts tab, unless you buy an add-on called ContactsBreeze.

But the edge doesn’t stop there. Like the Palm Treo 700w, Spb Diary can display contacts by their pictures on your Today screen, making finding and dialing your friends simple and intuitive. I thought this seemed like a gimmick at first, but it really helps. We’re visual creatures, and you find yourself homing in on those pictures. It really is so much faster than looking someone up in a text-based list.

 And if you do need to look someone up, the Contacts tab has a little abc/def… bar along the bottom. This works kind of like a flat T9. If you wanted to look up “Jeff Kirvin”, you’d tap the jkl button and then the def button, and suddenly the list is shortened to just entries that mach those letter combinations, either text or picture. If I tap on jkl and then mno, I get both Josh Curry and Knollwood Apartments. And yes, those buttons can be “tapped” with the d-pad.

And now for the weather…

Something else PocketBreeze can’t do is seamless weather integration. If you have Spb Weather as well as Spb Diary, you can tell Spb Diary to tie into the weather. For each day, just to the left of the time bar, you’ll see a little icon that summarizes that day’s weather forecast. Tap on that icon, and you get a detailed forecast by time of day, complete with humidity, air pressure and wind velocity.

Got to keep them integrated…

But where Spb Diary really starts to shine is by integrating it into Spb Pocket Plus. There are actually different ways to do this. You can display Spb Diary complete in a Pocket Plus tab, looking identical to how it looks on its own in the Today screen. (I typically call that tab Planner or something similar. I like this because it gives me a nice way to keep the complexity to a minimum, showing only two tabs: Planner and System, with the System tabs holding my meters and a few other icons. To do this, you just create a new tab in Pocket Plus and pick Spb Diary from the options. Then you have a nice two tabs horizontally and all the Spb Diary tabs down the left side.

Or, if you’re a horizontal tab person, you can check the “Horizontal tabs in Pocket Plus” box in the Spb Diary options and then create a new tab in Pocket Plus for each Spb Diary tab you’d like displayed. Along with a tab for Pocket Plus’s system meters and a tab for Spb Weather, this can get busy, but you give each tab the entire width of the Today screen.

All this neat stuff comes at a price of course. Having Pocket Plus, Spb Diary and Spb Weather all installed in main memory takes up a fair chunk of your storage space. Surprisingly, the performance hit, having all that code in memory because it’s on the Today screen, isn’t that bad.

Survey says…

Spb Diary is a dandy planner application, and it’s even better when installed and used in conjunction with other Spb apps like Pocket Plus and Spb Weather. It offers several features not offered by the competition (contacts being the most notable) and makes intelligent use of the Today screen real estate it’s given. Definitely worth trying out the demo if you’re not content with the stock Today plugins.

Next: And the winner is?