EssentialPIM has issued several releases since our year-end review of 2024, including the major v12.2. You can find a summary of the changes on the Blog & News Page.
Let's look at some of the more significant enhancements in EPIM v12.2. The changes fall broadly into two categories:
- More ways to organize your information, and
- Seeing it better.
Filter and layout options extended.
Filter and layout options have been extended throughout EPIM's modules.
For example, in the Calendar, buttons to filter items and change the layout appeared only in the Agenda view in previous versions. These have been extended to all Calendar views (Figure 1).
Several options have been added to the Filter; the one to Clear Filters (Figure 2) is especially helpful because you can clear multiple filters with one click.
Figure 1. The filter and layout buttons for the Calendar were available only in the Agenda view in prior versions. These are now at your disposal in all views.
Figure 2. There had been three filter options in the Calendar, now there are seven. Especially helpful is the ability to clear all filters with one click.
Trash is another module where Filter and Layout options have been introduced (Figure 3). Options include filtering items by their type and/or modified date and displaying them in groups.
Figure 3. EPIM v12.2 introduces filter and layout options to the Trash module, allowing you to organize items here as never before.
Another button has been added to the Quick Filter Bar in the Mail module: Follow Up. With one click, other messages drop from the display, making it easier to concentrate on those you flagged to follow up on (Figure 4).
Notice that the Follow Up button appears twice.
- The Quick Filter Bar. This button serves to display only those messages flagged for follow-up.
- The Toolbar. Here, you decide how to follow up, such as scheduling, setting a reminder, or marking complete. When you select a follow-up action, EPIM will set a flag on the message and create a task.
Figure 4. Follow-up was an action you could take on messages in prior versions. Now, it's also a filter to display only those messages you have flagged for monitoring.
Several displays enhanced.
The latest release enhances several displays.
Figure 5 compares the small calendar of a prior version with that in v12.2. The calendar is larger, and days that have appointments are more distinct. This extends to the calendar in the sidebar as well.
Figure 5. Compare the size and appearance of the small calendar in v12.2 (right) with previous versions.
Finding the results of a quick search in rich text emails has gotten easier as EPIM has improved highlighting the results, making them stand out when scrolling through a message (Figure 6).
Figure 6. Quick search displays the number of hits for a string (#1), filters the messages to display those where the string is found (#2), and highlights the result in the body of the message (#3).
EPIM has provided a count of all items in the Smart Lists but extends this in v12.2 to all lists in Tasks and Notes and to groups in Contacts and Passwords (Figure 7). The display of these tallies has also been enhanced.
Figure 7. Prior versions displayed the number of items by category in the Smart Lists; tallies now appear for all lists in the tree (Column 1). The display of total items has also been enhanced (Column 2).
The development team continues its responsiveness.
Users frequently commend the EPIM developers for responding to requests for new features and reports of glitches. The quick release of v12.2.1 is another example.
EPIM v12.2 introduced dynamic resizing of columns in table views, which was intended to "automatically adjust the width of columns while maintaining proportions, no matter how you resize the main program window." Several users, including me, reported erratic behavior with the new feature. In my case, columns shrank to a minimum width after I edited an item or resized the main window. The frequency of resizing the columns became untenable.
We appealed for this feature to be made optional. Twenty-two days after the release of v12.2, the team issued v12.2.1, in which sizing columns dynamically can be disabled.
These are among the significant enhancements in the latest release. EssentialPIM is a complex application. If there are features you would like to know more about, let us know in the comments.