I've got lots of feedback during the last days in regard to finding the Ultimate Organizer (not only as comments in this blog.) Thanks, everybody!

What I realized from the comments is, that everybody seems to have a different (primary) use for their favorite tool. And in almost all cases it's different than mine. Which probably means, that I didn't really bother to communicate it well in the first place.

After thinking about this for a while I realized that perhaps I've been wanting too much from one piece of software. And after deciding to break it down into three components I found that I already have the third solution in place for over a year now, without realiziing it: I was just looking at the problem from the wrong angle...

Well, to make things (somewhat) short, here are my goals

• Contacts, Calendar and To-Do-Management
• Document- and Ideas-Managment
• WYSIWYG-Hypertext / XML editor

Not surprisingly, none of the evaluated applications was good at all three aspects. But by breaking the requirements up like this had its benefits. The first and most surprising (to me) is No. 3: while using SubEthaEdit, BBEdit or trying out VoodooPad for my hypertext writing I never was too happy with any. The first two have full control over the code, being non-visual editors. But it's still cumbersome to hand-insert the tags and attributes. And VoodooPad doesn't offer enough control over the code. But having redefined my criteria, I realized that I've been using the perfect solution already all along: XMLMind Editor! More on this veritable gem and Swiss Army Knife in a future post.

And for the first category the most interesting contestant at the moment is definitely Life Balance (thanks Marcus!).

And for the second? Well, having number one (hopefully) soon and number three already covered, it's not all that urgent anymore... Happy times to be a geek!