Last night I was up writing a document for my job. The document was due today and I had put off writing it for four days. Everything was written at the last minute so it didn't come out great, but ok. Consequently I'm writing this journal entry a day later.

Like many people, I put off certain things that I don't want to do. Writing reports and documents is one. Another is meeting people, setting up meetings, contacting people and the like. And I'll put off things that I think will take me a long time or that I need to be "in the mood" to do.

In high school, any project that had a due date of more than I week I put off until the last day or two. Subsequently, most of the time my grades for such assignments were rather poor. Conversely, I usually had my daily homework done before I took the bus home.

I'm also very passive aggressive, so I won't say that I can't handle certain things at my job, like anything that requires talking to people outside my group. I'll just kind of flounder around until I somehow get it done. Not fun.

I'm quite forgetful, so I habitually keep a pen and paper with me. That way I can write things I need to do later or other random pieces of information. I used to have a daily journal book that I used to keep track of what I did at my previous job. So that when someone asked me if I had done something or if a similar situation occured I could look back and hopefully the one-line description would jog my memory.

Now I keep my to-do lists on my computer's PIM (Palm Desktop 2.0). That's quite a good program, which is an upgraded version of Claris Organizer, which I also used. The big selling point of Claris Org was it's "intelligence". You could write a note saying "call Dave at 15:00" and it would set up an appointment to call the Dave in the phone book at 15:00. I don't have a Palm Pilot so I don't know about the synchronization features.

I've used Now Contact/Up-to-date and some other PIMs that are no longer being made. But Claris Organizer is elegant and small, it has the features I want and not too many features that I don't care about. That's what I liked about Claris products, they were designed to be easy to use by most users and to have enough functionality to be useful.

Which brings me to reflect on the demise of Claris. Claris made really good software. They supported Apple technologies (obviously) and defined a certain GUI standard that was emulated by other applications. Claris set the standard for good Mac OS applications that didn't try to do too much.

There were a few down sides to the situation though. Claris was an Apple subsidiary and competition for 3rd party applications. There were several movements to spin off Claris or just fold it so that Apple wouldn't be seen as competing with third party developers. (Contrast this with Microsoft Office).

The end of Claris was a sad event. Filemaker and Homepage live on in Filemaker, Inc. ClarisWorks is now AppleWorks. Organizer is now Palm Desktop. But I don't think any other Claris applications have found another home. MacWrite Pro, ClarisDraw (and I remember using some sort of Claris drawing program to do technical drawings in one of my engineering classes), Claris Impact, and others are dead. Elegant applications that filled the need of most people most of the time.