12. The Dog Ate It: Students Get Organized

By Mark Raby

College students are typically comprised of two major groups - those who are meticulously organized and those who haven't taken the trash out in 2 months. I've got to admit I'm no stranger to the latter category myself. Even so, I know that it's impossible to get anywhere near a 4.0 without having something to keep track of your assignments, grades, and your class schedule. (Seriously, who hasn't accidentally gone to their Thursday class on Wednesday at least once?). If you're still carrying around a spiral-bound school planner, you need to get out of the stone age and get some sort of digital planner. Few apps are as feature packed and easy to use as "The Dog Ate It" by Birdsoft.

"The Dog Ate It" is similar to standard PDA calendar/tasks applications, but it makes them a little more visually pleasing and adds a slate of school-specific organizational tools. The program is fully customizable and lets you enter everything that a student needs to know about their current semester. You can program, either by percentage levels or total number of points, the tier for each grade in each class. You'll then be able to see how feasible it is during the semester to reach that coveted "A". It's even got a section for text books. You can enter book titles, ISBN numbers and prices so you'll know exactly how much you need to steal from the bank in order to afford all your text books.

Other than that, the functionality is like any good scheduling program. You can schedule class times, exams, extracurricular activities and the like on a daily or weekly basis or anywhere in between. The interface is very nice, with the ability to mark any task urgent or completed. It also gives you an array of viewing options, by week, by day, or by month using either with a calendar or list view. You can also view all the upcoming events in one individual class and even filter to show all items that you've marked as urgent. There's a seemingly endless way to look through all the information you've programmed and that's what really makes "The Dog Ate It" stand out from other task-oriented apps.

There's also a PC version of the software, exactly the same program, which syncs up with your PDA, but it's sold separately. The PDA version by itself sells for $14.95, while the PC/PDA bundle costs $25.95. Buy "The Dog Ate It" at www.birdsoft.biz/dogateit2.htm

There are two stories in our back to school special. This one is about mobile computing accessories. The other story is about buying a notebook computer for less than $700.

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