Original review published on Steve Litchfield's 3-Lib.

I've been looking forward to this review for a long time, as something I can get my teeth into... I have a naturally tidy mind, and welcome wholeheartedly anything that manages to reduce complexity and clutter.

Paul Law's publicity slogan "What other applications call a finished product Desktop calls a sub routine" rather gives the game away (if slightly boastfully!). It aims to combine a lot of the existing small Series 5 utilities into a single integrated application and largely succeeds. I've been looking at v1.0, grabbed from Paul's web site.

It's tempting to be critical of Paul for including the contents of so many small freeware utilities in what is marketed as a shareware application, but there's plenty of original content too, to win over any doubters. Following on from Paul's earlier Contact Log for the 3a/3c, the main module in Desktop is undoubtedly the "Event log". Allowing logging of calls, meetings, packages of work and so forth, and including browsing and searching, the event log will be very useful to a great many business users. In fact, I wish Paul had gone further and implemented filtering by type or reference so that only those found items were shown. And not having the option to insert or attach Word, Sketch or Sheet files seems an omission.

Moving on, there's a useful elapsed time counter (integrated to output its final total into the event log!), a "Desktop Jotter" (much like the equivalent S3c feature) and an intuitive currency converter. No utilities package would be complete without units conversion functions and these are here as well, though I found them confusing in places. Incidentally, information from the Jotter, Event log etc. can be dumped to a printer, though the printing support is very rudimentary in that you get no control whatsoever of what comes out!

There's more to Desktop than I can reasonably list here, but other highlights are the 'standard' file template selector (for invoices, form letters etc.), the text file editor and being able to turn the system sound on or off without having to resort to the 5's slow Control Panel. A few of the extra features did seem a bit pointless, such as the clock and the backlight toggle, both of which have single key presses already on the Series 5.

It's more than apparent throughout that Paul Law has spent a long time on this application, and despite quite a few small 'v1.0' niggles I feel that he's fully justified in making Desktop shareware. In case you are wondering about the picture in the background, its significance is to look pretty (nothing wrong in that!) and form a backdrop for Desktop's equally pretty 'Post-It' notes. Other backdrops are pre-formatted for you and available freely on Paul's web page.

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