Notes for Reviewing Time Traveler

These notes are intended for those who are reviewing Time Traveler. The following list highlights what we consider to be the most important features of Time Traveler:

Time Traveler is a one-stop purchase of US$29.95 that will satisfy all time zone needs. Having heavily researched alternative time zone products, we believe that you would have to spend over US$50 to obtain similar functionality. Additionally you would have to deal with a minimum of three vendors instead of one, and would not have products that integrate with each other.

Time Place displays four commonly referenced times on the map at their geographic locations. This facilitates being able to glance at the map and quickly determine the time, the day and if it is day or night for a location.

The world map can be zoomed to a view of the world that you commonly reference. This allows you to tap on the map and obtain the times of locations more finely than when the map is fully displayed.

You can determine what locations are displayed when you tap on the map. This is done by alternating the day/night symbol in the main list next to a location. The accuracy of your Palm's pen on the screen can be course. Determining what locations appear is useful to compensate for inaccurate location taps so that unwanted cities do not appear.

Time Place draws a dashed line to indicate midnight and also displays the day of yesterday or tomorrow as needed. This allows you to very quickly determine where in the world is on the same day as you.

As a minimum, using our product to enter an itinerary provides an easy means of entering travel information into your Palm Date Book. We believe that you would already create Palm Date Book entries for departure and arrival times. Entering itineraries with Time Travel allows you to speed up what you already do, keep your Palm organizer's clock synchronized with time zone changes, inform Time Place what the current time zone is, inform Time Book to reschedule Palm Date Book appointments into the new time zone and export itineraries to almost any Palm application including Palm Mail and Palm Memo Pad! We do not know of any other product that does all of that.

Time Book supplements the Palm Date Book's functionality. We recognise that the Palm Date Book is a good application which does not require wholesale replacement. Supplementing the Palm Date Book results in: (i) a reduced memory footprint; and (ii) the ease of being able to readily use any new Palm Date Book functionality that Palm provide.

Time Book allows you to enter time zone savvy appointments via the Palm Date Book, MS Outlook, the Palm Desktop, Yahoo Calendar etc., by recognising '(' and ')' as delimeters for a location.

Time Book can perform versatile "what-if" style scenarios for negotiating sensible appointment times across time zones. You can associate an appointment in relation to your current time zone or a time zone that you will be in.

Time Travel provides a relatively "hands-off" travel experience. Other "itinerary" type applications require you to acknowledge a dialog box to move into the new time or they do not automatically move into the new time at all. Time Travel requires no additional user interaction once an itinerary is entered.

Time Place is the only product of its type that offers four readable analog clocks. Most other solutions are digital clocks. Time Place offers the digital display of time as a secondary list display.

Sounds can be associated with different Time Place events i.e. when an alarm is triggered and when you move into or out of Daylight Savings Time.

No other product allows you to quickly reference the time of a zone that is not displayed as one of the four clocks. With Time Place, you can enter the letters of a place and its corresponding list entry will be displayed along with its time.

Some other products provide a volitile means of managing time zone information e.g. they might use the Palm MemoPad. The problem with this approach is that some textual representation of data is required. Textual representations can easily be fouled by mistyping characters. While there can be no guaranteed method of entering and maintaining time zone data, Time Place minimises the chances of incorrect data entry. This is done by allowing you to base places on other places - time zone information is then inherited into your place. If the information changes in the places that you based your place on, this information will automatically be reflected in yours.

We provide a mechanism for our customers to receive updates to the Time Place database. This allows our customers to freely modify their database and be able to incorporate any new and modified Time Places that we provide. We have not observed any other supplier catering for their customer's data integrity needs so highly.

Moving into and out of daylight savings time is a friendly experience. Time Place informs you of the change at 12pm on the previous day - not at 2am or 3am when the event actually occurs!

Time Place integrates with Time Traveler, our complete time zone management solution for the Palm Computing Platform(R). This integration allows Time Place to intelligently display your current time zone based on traveling with itineraries.

Time Traveler is focused on keeping the system clock synchronised with local time. Other products offer multiple time zone views of the Date Book without moving the system clock into local time. The problem with the non-local approach is that other applications dependent on local time may not behave as expected when you travel.

Time Travel provides comprehensive Palm Date Book integration with appointments appearing for departure, transit and arrival as needed. Arrival before departure and trips spanning midnight are also catered for. Notes can even be associated with arrival appointments via Time Travel. We have observed other products not having anywhere near the same degree of Palm Date Book integration.

Other products typically provide a "monolithic" application that houses all of the functionality. Our approach is a modular one consisting of a number of applications that integrate seemlessly together. Our approach allows future decisions to integrate with other third party solutions and for them to integrate with us. Additionally you can run any of the Time Traveler applications without the others being present.

Many other products are provided with manuals. While we provide an online manual, our goal is to see our customers use Time Traveler effectively without having to consult one.

We have made every effort to ensure that the above statements are true. Please be aware that products do change and that this data may become out of date. Other suppliers may also read this page, realise their failings and then change their product! If you have a particular question concerning review points then please contact us.