Simplify Making Address Book, Calendar Entries with Anagram

Textual has released Anagram, an application that interprets plain English text to create new address book, calendar, to-do list, and memo records. Text from any source on a Windows PC, such as an e-mail, website, or other document, can be captured by the app by pressing a single key. Anagram then makes sense of the meaningful parts of the text and sorts them to the correct fields in a new record in the Palm Desktop app. It costs $25.

Anagram first uses simple cues in the captured text to determine what type of record the user is trying to create. Then Anagram uses a larger set of cues and recursive rules to recognize the individual elements of the record; for example, which words are a person's first name? What time does the meeting start? Which phone number is the fax number? The relevant data is extracted, reformatted based on the user's preferences, and added to the user's Palm Desktop application. After the user reviews it, it's ready to be moved to their handheld when they HotSync.

A version of Anagram that works with Microsoft Outlook is under development.

"Anagram adds a level of intelligence to the PCs of Palm users that is truly useful and time-saving," said Nicholas Maddix, owner of Textual. "People use Palms constantly to keep track of addresses and appointments, and we use e-mail even more often to share these things with friends or co-workers. Anagram serves as an effective bridge between these two technologies, without asking people to change the way they use either one."

Related Information:

• PIC: Import Data to Your Palm with Syncplicity