AddingUnderstanding

Chronos the makers of SOHO Organizer have posted a paid upgrade to version 6. I spent time troubleshooting the last paid beta the company released over a year ago. Presently while I am not in the market I have to wonder at the fact that the Chronos technical support forums have been "discontinued". On January 26, 2006 Chronos had posted a policy that helped make the forums ineffective when customers, tired of delays, broken software and broken promises, took to posting comments that revealed the incomplete and broken nature of the software. Evidently sometime between January 2006 and mid-2007 the forums were taken down. One wonders if the reason for this was to help prevent would-be purchasers from discovering what past buyers thought of the money they'd spent.

So what is to be done when you get around to releasing an incredibly buggy piece of software much later than promised just to get it out the door? Evidently if you're Chronos you close up shop and head out to the industry trade show. As if that weren't insulting enough when people post about it in the discussion area evidently there is time request people take posts down but not to address the concerns.

Chronos produced a great set of tools Group Organizer and Personal Organizer for several years. As all around personal information managers they ruled the Mac platform with little competition. Personal Organizer suffered some competition from Apple's iCal and Address Book but had enough features to make it valuable. The interfaces of both programs suffered from never making the jump to the new Aqua design of OS X.

Following a June 15th announcement last year Chronos continued to push back the announced "forthcoming soon" date until the end of the year. Then SOHO Organizer hit with a thud instead of a bang. Right away the problem for existing Chronos customers was what to do to convert data. In the sidebar of their site Chronos promised a converter tool for old data by "December 31". On the last day of last year that promise became the more general "coming soon" and "check back often". They would have been better off to say don't check back for a month. That way at least there would be a possibility of it actually appearing before the next check.

All of this adds up to being pretty discouraging. It only gets worse when visiting the message boards. There you find out that there is no mention of the data conversion tool. Not just no mention but the emphatic "It has always been our intention to implement calendar views like the ones you're used to in Personal Organizer. This will be our PRIMARY focus in the coming months." So there is no converter and it seems none is forthcoming. There are nice promises like "We hope to have most or all of the calendar views implemented in the first quarter of 2006." This from a company that has recently demonstrated an inability to ship beta quality software even months after the original ship date.

Perhaps it wouldn't be so dispiriting if they seemed to be making an effort. Instead their efforts are focused elsewhere. It is all frustrating as the calendaring and sharing options on OS X are more limited than they should be.