Now Up-To-Date and Contact 5 review

Although Apple includes contact and time management software with every copy of Mac OS X in the form of iCal and Address Book, they're simplistic applications that act as little more than replacements for a paper diary.

Thankfully, there are other options available - most notably Entourage, which comes as part of the Office suite from Microsoft. If you prefer not to use Office, though, or find Entourage pours on too many features, another option is the long-established duo of Now Up-To-Date and Contact.

Once sold as two separate applications, the Now programs have more recently been sold only as a bundle. While Apple's bundled applications only support single users, the Now applications have added workgroup calendaring, allowing you to share information easily and quickly. Best of all, this multi-user capability is free - you don't have to buy separate server software - and it works with both Mac and PC versions of Now.

Version 5's revamped interface is clearer and easier to read in both the applications, and boasts a new Schedule view that allows you to see the availability of users in a single screen. This makes it much easier to see when others are available, making scheduling a meeting much quicker.

Now can also subscribe to calendars in the iCal format, which Apple uses when publishing a calendar from iCal to the web. This allows you to subscribe to any of the host of calendars published by iCal users, as well as useful ones such as UK public holidays, sports events and so on.

Both vCard and iCalendar support have been added, which makes getting information into and out of the Now programs from other applications much simpler. The product already includes the ability to synchronise to Apple's Address Book, which means you rely on that and iSync to synchronise your contacts to a mobile phone you will be able to continue to do so while using Now. There's still no way at present to synchronise information with iCal, although importing a calendar is a straightforward process.

One of the stand-out features of the Now programs has always been the Quick Calendar and Quick Contact components. These are small applications, chosen from the menu bar, that enable you to access the calendar and contacts without having to open up the main applications. Whether these are as valuable in the days of a true multi-tasking operating system as they were back when System 7 was the latest version is moot, but this update's versions are slicker and easier to use than previous ones.

All this adds up to small but decent updates for the main applications. Probably the best update isn't to the programs at all, though. Now Software has used e-book publishing company Take Control to offer a rewritten version of the manual for the programs, one of which is significantly better than anything previously offered. OK, so you could argue about whether relatively simple software really requires a long manual, but we're still pleased to see a company taking the provision of documentation seriously enough to expend time and energy on it; other software companies should take note.

The Now suite's strength remains its ability to link contacts, to-dos and appointments with ease. Drag a contact to the calendar, and an appointment is created that's linked to them. Drag a to-do to a contact, and it's linked to that person, which makes it simple to manage the associations between what you're doing and who's connected to it. You can then see every to-do and appointment associated with a contact, so you can manage your relationship with a person much more effectively.