Dear Above & Beyond 4.0 users:
With its introduction today, Above & Beyond 98 vastly surpasses Above &
Beyond 4.0, as the world's most powerful time management system.
98 is most significant single upgrade ever to Above & Beyond.
There are hundreds of enhancements. Much of the added power was given to managing tasks
and projects.
Two aspects stand out. First, you can indicate that a particular task can be split. Enter
an item that you expect will take, say 500 hours, to complete. As a split item, Above
& Beyond will split it up during workload balancing so there are multiple
instances spread over a number of days that total 500 hours. Second, you can sequence
tasks. The sequencing feature alone gives you the basic power of Project Management
software easily costing five or ten times the total price of Above & Beyond
coupled with fantastic simplicity. To enable sequencing, you simply press F4 for an item
on the priority list. Above & Beyond then will schedule the task only after its
predecessor.
For those who want to tackle their work, nothing beats AutoPilot. AutoPilot is a feature
introduced in Above & Beyond 98 that automatically balances your workload. It
moves fluid tasks on and off your current day's schedule based on available time and all
other constraints. This means you are always seeing the most optimized scheduled possible
without even lifting a finger.
Here's how it works. Suppose you have 80 items on today's schedule as you start your day
at 8am. The phone rings. There's a crisis at the regional office in Japan. Unexpectedly
you're on the phone 90 minutes. During that time, Above & Beyond periodically
bumps the lowest priority tasks to tomorrow's schedule, updating your view with a
conflict-free schedule plan for today. AutoPilot runs every few minutes to keep your
schedule workload balanced, automatically.
It has raised my daily productivity and lowered my daily stress. No longer do I face the
unpleasant sight of persistently seeing my schedule jammed with items marked in red
because there's no longer enough time in the day to do them. (In Above & Beyond
4.0, I used Ctrl+L to move them off manually.)
The converse is also handled. When a hole opens up in my schedule, AutoPilot will fill it
smartly. I want to see how much I can possibly accomplish today, and then plan on getting
it done. There's no sense aiming for 75% when I can aspire to deliver 100% return on my
time. Further the Ctrl+M feature in Above & Beyond 4.0 was a bit crude and
sometimes brought in tasks that were out of time range. Because of this, in Above &
Beyond 4.0, I would normally be forced to view a logjam schedule just to get those items
into view that I wanted to do today. Not any more. Above & Beyond 98 does a
terrific job with AutoPilot.
The better optimized my schedule is, the more it lets me focus on only what I need to
anticipate. Being prepared then allows me to perform at twice the pace.
A to Z Priorities
The Priority List has been in Above & Beyond since it was introduced in 1992.
Tasks are ranked relative to each other, with task #1 being the highest priority. What we
found in practice, however, was that one tended to add new tasks to the middle or upper
part of the list. This caused items in the bottom half of the list to get deferred
indefinitely. For example, suppose that today your priority list has 30 items. There is an
important item at #15/30, Collect $10,000 . The item is ranked 15. You have
30 items total in your priority list. That task is scheduled for 4 days from now. In the
course of the today, you add several items, most of them in the upper half of the priority
list, because you don't feel like reading the whole list and they seem rather urgent
and/or important. As a result, Collect $10,000 drops to #21/35. Tomorrow,
same thing. It drops to #30/45. From here on, even if you add items in the bottom half,
most of them will still bump this task further down. If this continues for six months, Collect
$10,000 may be #250/300. One morning you wake up and say, "Hey I never
collected that $10,000! What happened?" It's more or less buried.
We noticed this phenomenon over the past couple years, and recently decided to do
something about it. The solution was to make adding tasks smarter, yet easier. The simple,
yet flawed approach would be to simply add most new tasks at the end of your priority
list. But that's less than ideal. We came up with a better solution: Tiered priorities.
This uses the traditional method of labeling priorities with letters, e.g. A, B, C, etc.
You can use any letter through Z. This way, as you add important items you can simply
indicate "A" for a new task, and Above & Beyond 98 will place this
task at the end of the As. In this way, your "Collect $10,000" could be entered
as an A and gradually work its way upward in the list as new A items are added at the end
of the A tier.
The tiers architecture introduced in Above & Beyond 98 also makes it easier to
group tasks of similar nature that you want to defer for some project months from now. You
could designate "G" for "after graduation" for example.
Prerequisites
Above & Beyond users must be quite a savvy lot of dynamic planners, because we
received numerous requests for a feature that I have dubbed "prerequisite." You
can use the prerequisite feature when you want to plan a task that cannot be started until
something else is done. This is similar to the sequencing feature. The difference is that
the tasks need not be adjacent in the priority list. Many tasks in this way can share the
same prerequisite. Prerequisite is a rarely used feature and so it is only available on
the custom item dialog box. See the Insert menu and Edit, Advanced commands menu.
Prerequisites are not mutually exclusive with the sequencing property. You can have both
on a given task.
Another advanced feature of Prerequisite that distinguishes it from Sequence is the use of
lag time. You can specify a number of days or even hours and minutes that should occur
between the prerequisite and the given task. This is obviously a very powerful feature.
Project-specific Filtering
A often requested feature over the past year has been Project-specific Filtering. Above
& Beyond 98 introduces the feature that allows you to easily view only items that
belong to a specific project. You simply press Shift+F while an item of the project you
want is selected. Press it again to toggle back to viewing all items. When the filtering
is on, it affects all views, including the month view.
Archiving Projects
Several users complained that they may finish a project, and yet it still appears in the
pick-from pull-down list of projects as you're inserting a task. Now you can mark the
project done in the project view. It will appear lined-out. Thereafter it will not appear
in the pull-down list, but it will persist in the project view, in case you want to refer
to it, rename it, or un-archive it by pressing spacebar again to mark it undone.
Time Card
More and more companies are offering flextime. At 1Soft employees frequently vary their
hours day-to-day. The time card feature allows one to total up their hours easily. It's no
fun tallying hours by hand when dealing with hours and minutes. Above & Beyond 98
handles it with aplomb. This feature also makes it possible to easily guard against
exceeding 40 hours in your current week. To use the Time Card feature first tag which
projects are to be included. Use F4 to toggle the billing in the Project View. A '$' will
appear beside tagged projects.
32-bit
Above & Beyond 98 is the first version that is built on the 32-bit Win32
architecture. This means it is slightly more robust than a 16-bit application, but
unfortunately it will not run on Windows 3.x. We still offer Above & Beyond 4.0
for users unwilling or unable to upgrade to Windows 95 or Windows NT. Above &
Beyond 98 is fully compatible and has been tested with Windows 98 and Windows NT 5.0.
If you are sharing schedules on a LAN and some of your users are running Above &
Beyond 4.0, you can use File:SaveAs 4.0 to seamlessly read and update their schedules.
Ticklers
Ticklers are a type of alarm that alerts you days, not minutes before an event. You set
ticklers in the standard alarm setting dialog box while inserting or editing an item. As
they occur, tickler pop-up messages appear first thing each day in much the same way as an
alarm. The message tells you how many days until the event. They're great for remembering
to buy a gift or send a card ahead of someone's birthday. This feature only exists in Above
& Beyond 98.
Contact Management
The old Above & Beyond Notebook wasn't keeping up with today's demands for
sortable, maximally configurable address book data. The Windows Address Book that ships
with Internet Explorer (free) provides a good solution. Now when you click on the phone
toolbar icon, it launches the Windows Address Book (WAB.exe) and switches your focus to
it. During installation, Above & Beyond 98 copies wab.exe from wherever it can
find it on your hard drive, to the Above & Beyond directory. This has no effect
on the data file for WAB, which is handled by the application independently of Above
& Beyond.
Novice Mode
Many users have suggested that Above & Beyond can be intimidating for a new
users. Dozens of commands, long menus, esoteric, unheard of features and concepts. One
example being Workload Balancing. For the user who just set down their paper planner,
Above & Beyond is a lot to swallow without cutting it up. And so we did. New users
automatically start in Novice mode. The command-set for Novice mode provides only the
basics. It eliminates the priority list, fluid items, workload balancing, email, begin
times on floating tasks, projects, File:Transfer menu (Export, Import, SaveAs, etc.),
Edit:Advanced menu (including Done Special), Surprise menu, Worktools menu,
Options:Settings menu (passwords, colors, fonts), Options:Calendar, Options:Time Values,
vital, squeeze, private item, hidden properties, and other advanced features. One can
change the user level mode in the Preferences dialog box, which is on the Options menu.
World Timeline
Now you can easily choose your time zones from a pick list and even replace the chosen
city of the zone. In Above & Beyond 98 you can have any number of zones,
instead of the fixed number in Above & Beyond 4.0.
Preferences
At long last, you can configure Above & Beyond more the way you want it. There
are numerous options. Preferences is found on the Options menu. There are some new
features such as Moon Phases.
Squeeze
Perhaps you have something you'd like to do today if time allows. Let's suppose that item
is "go hiking." You know you don't want to hike later than 4pm as the air is
cooling off. You want to hike for up to 3 hours, but any length of time is better than
none. For this purpose, there is Squeeze. When Squeeze is set on for an item it will
extend no later than it's lastest end time, and its length will be whatever time is
available up to the indicated duration. The Squeeze option is only available in the Custom
item dialog box.
Hidden Items
My schedules are typically packed with 90+ items each day. It distracts me to repeatedly
read trivial tasks before their appointed earliest begin, even if they have the helpful
'/' before them. I don't want to see them until the time comes when I can actually do
them. For this reason, I added the Hidden item feature. Mark an item hidden and it won't
appear until it can be done. So an item that is 10am at the earliest begin, will appear as
a blank line in the schedule until 10am on today's schedule. Ctrl+F4 toggles this
property.
Simpler Insert Boxes
In our quest to make Above & Beyond simpler, we've broken up the old Insert
dialog box into more specialized, simpler dialogs. You can still get the old Insert and
Modify box. It is called Custom. It has more controls than in 4.0 because we've added
Squeeze, Prerequisite and other controls to it. But for most of the items you enter, the
new simpler boxes will offer a cleaner, less distracting look. There are dialogs specific
to inserting Tasks, Memos, Appointments, Events, Birthdays, etc. They are on the new
Insert menu. Currently Birthdays, Anniversaries, and Holidays are all the same. They are
simply recurring annual items. In the next release however, some smarts will be added to
give you additional functionality such as automatically computing which birthday or
anniversary it is, and in the case of Holidays, affecting the rest of your schedule based
on their presence.
Undelete
How many times have you answered "yes, I'm sure" before you've even read what it
is you're deleting? I know I've done it a few times. It's not a good feeling. Now, there's
relief. In Above & Beyond 98, you can bring back items you delete mistakenly.
Numerous Enhancements
The Time Values dialog box now computes on the basis of normal work days, not calendar
days. Item descriptions can be up to 1000 characters, and increase from the 365 allowed in
Above & Beyond 4.0. The term "Highlited" has been replaced by
"Vital" so as not to be confused with the visual effects of selecting an item
while adding stronger meaning. In Above & Beyond 98, at long last, you can mark
items done even if you're not on today's schedule. Done commands will work from future
days, and from the priority list. Above & Beyond will simply ask first to
ensure that's what you intended.
As always, your comments, bug reports and suggestions are welcome.
1Soft is the only company that offers dynamic scheduling. Further Above & Beyond
has been refined meticulously over the last five years. We're passionate about creating
the ultimate tool for time management. Everyone at 1Soft uses it all day long, both at
work and home. I have it juggle more than 1000 items in my fast moving priority list. It
is a safe bet that my ten employees accomplish two or three times as much each week using Above
& Beyond, than they would with any other PIM. The benefits are enormous.
It's a joy to work on what may be one of the most valuable products ever created. The
timesaving for our ten-person company last year exceeded $300,000. Quite a benefit,
considering an end-user cost for a 10-user LAN workgroup is less than $2000. For a typical
company, that's a return of more than 150 times your investment in the first year alone.
Essentially it's paid for 3 days after you get up to speed. And now there's an option to
have any blend of LITE copies (only $39.95 per user) with the traditional PRO version
($149.95 each). I hope you will find the flexibility and remarkable value that Above &
Beyond 98 offers in use and cost a cause for celebration.
Thank you for your support. Best wishes for success in all your endeavors.
Yours truly,
Gregory Scott Thorne
Chief Developer, Above & Beyond
President, 1Soft
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