SOHO Organizer - 8.09

This product is seductive. The idea is great. Unfortunately, the execution is awful. Don't buy Chronos Organizer under any circumstance, no matter how tempting -- over the long run you'll waste time and energy. The product is irredeemably buggy, and the customer service is worse than bad -- it basically doesn't exist.

I bought version 5 years ago. It was buggy, a complaint common among users at the time. I stopped using the product and skipped version 6 because the reviews were so bad. Version 7 got better reviews so I tried it and was reasonably satisfied, although it always felt like the details of the program hadn't been thoroughly thought through.

Version 8 looks better -- for example, you can finally view phone calls and e-mails associated with a particular contact. In theory. In practice, I haven't been able even to save records of phone calls made because of a variety of error messages. Worse, the upgrade wiped out all previous phone records. E-mail to customer service goes unanswered -- and others note that it can go unanswered for weeks. Chronos has no phone, so there's no way to discuss or register displeasure. (They used to have a user forum, but discontinued it because of the incredible volume of complaints.)

I've seen many posts over the years which in effect say: use Chronos if you want, but beware. But my experiences with it is that the product and the company are so disfunctional it's better to avoid them both. Buy or use another product -- you may not get all the features that Chronos claims to offer, but you won't invest in a product that all evidence suggests is never going to be any good, and you won't give money to a company that refuses to even acknowledge its customers.

Stay away from Chronos. I tried to use SOHO Notes/Organizer and for 23 days of the 30 day trial is was buggy and unstable. Finally better and company has ignored my repeated requests for a trial extension and now is ignoring my requests for help to get out of SOHO the material I had put into it. The phone hasn't answered at all in the two business days I've tried and there's no point in submitting a new support ticket.

Charles' review expresses alot of frustration so I'm mystified why this version of Organizer works so well for me.

I'm using MobileMe to Sync between my calendars computers, but any changes I make to iCal or SOHO Organizer are made almost instantaneously between the two programs on the same machine. The only Sync bug I found so far is that calendar color changes made in Organizer do not Sync to iCal, though it's fine in the other direction. Data syncs fine in both directions. I decided to switch over to SOHO Organizer from iCal after using iCal for about 2 years. Prior to that I used Chronos' Personal Organizer (v4) for over 5 years. Chronos gave me alot of grief with poor syncing with my old Palm PDA's but eventually they worked out the bugs.

So, why did I switch from iCal now? My reasons may seem trivial but when you rely on a scheduling program to map your work life sometimes even small improvements are actually huge. First, SOHO Organizer has a LIST VIEW!! How basic is this, folks?? Come on, Apple...you even have a list view on the iPhone / iPod Touch Calendar! I can find past events so much more easily in a list view, and find that old data that I need to make a quick decision for an upcoming event. Another seemingly insignificant but ESSENTIAL feature in protecting your important event data: CONFIRM DELETE! Organizer asks you "Are you sure..." after you hit the delete key. iCal? Not a peep. Even dragging an event in Organizer at least provides a visual indicator that you're making an important action: it brings up a big clock icon at the curser to show you that you're dragging an event and thus making a scheduling change. iCal, on the other hand, gives you NO visual feedback so accidently dragging an event to another day or time is dangerously too easy in iCal. [This very mishap nearly cost me a job and many hundreds of dollars: I got a call from one of my clients asking me "Where the hell are you" ...I showed up very late and embarrassed. Sure enough, I had accidently grabbed onto their scheduled event in iCal's Day View and moved it ever so slightly to an hour later than planned].

I'm not reviewing all the features this program offers over other calendar apps but these are my reasons to switch. My upgrade price from their old version 4 was $50 and well worth it to me. Frankly, Chronos' $100 price is going to scare away most users in the market for a good calendar alternative to iCal, which even with these faults is a darn good calendar app for most people. Reduce the price to a flat $50 for everyone and sales would probably quadruple. Regardless, highly recommended.

Soho has delivered on what it has promised for the past several years with Soho Organizer 8.06. It is fast and stable and does what a good integrated calendar and contact app should including providing a listing of all e-mails for a given contact in the contact pane, providing tabs for any number of views (ie: day, week, individual contact etc.), making entering events or tasks much more intuitive than ical and many more excellent features. I can finally recommend it especially to those who remember what a wonderful program Personal Organizer was several years ago.

I just posted the following to Chrono's "support" site:

In the last month or so, I have submitted a number of requests for support regarding both SohoNotes and Organizer, and have received no reply. One update corrected the most serious problem I reported (constant crashing) but I was not notified of the update till I checked for updates myself. Other problems I have reported (e.g., no longer able to rename notes in SohoNotes) have been completely ignored. A request for for info regarding NoteLife received a reply that essentially put responsibility for delay in making it available on Apple - I have begun to think that it was never submitted to Apple for approval and that the announcement was used only as bait for the gullible like myself to buy into an upgrade to version 8.0 that is quite a lot less functional than its predecessors. Meanwhile, I object strenuously to the "feature" in support that takes me to a FAQ list of utterly irrelevant issues regarding such matters registration of version 3 or 4, to see if they answer my question, before I am allowed to send in my questions. I plan to publish this note on VersionTracker, where there is, I believe, an option for public replies or explanation from developers. In any case, I'll be looking forward to hearing something by some avenue, whatever it is.