Relish

A text mode PIM software originally written and published by Dr. Randell S. Flint in 1987 for the OS/2 v1.0 operating system and from 1988 onwards published by his company Sundial Systems, later mostly re-written as a PM GUI application and to take advantage of technologies such as SOM and WPS, in addition to breaking up some operations to allow them to function in a more object-oriented fashion.

The software had a somewhat unique feature set and origins, it was touted by its author as a "time management software" rather than a PIM and users frequently referred to it as a calendar as much as anything else although it came with all the usual personal information and contact detail features that a usual PIM sports. Dr. Flint had been working at a company that developed relational databases when he was asked to look into why clients found it difficult to use relational databases as tools to store time management and group scheduling functions in, but his research indicated that users simply found the form filling that was required somewhat alien to the serial fashion of how most people thought about time management.

When Microsoft and IBM announced OS/2 he had the idea of creating a specialised database program that stored time management informations and decided to target OS/2 rather than DOS one one hand because multi-threading made the creation of message based applications easier and as he envisioned that people would be using a time management tool alongside their other work on a PC so multi tasking was critical, this made the forthcoming OS/2 an ideal fit for his idea. At the time a similar option on a DOS machine would have required him to write the software as a Terminate and Stay Resident (TSR) program similar to how DOS programs like Borland Sidekick worked, which is quite a hairy operation for anything but the most trivial programs and while it is technically possible to have more than one TSR loaded at a time in practice it was not really so. Microsoft Windows was a marketing and technical failure at the time and with most of its users running it on an 8088 class machine with less than a megabyte of a memory, a stable multitasking environment it was not.

The company had started working on a major update to the program to be known as Relish 2.3 as early as 1998 but as Sundial Systems had only a limited amount of developer personnel available they decided to focus their efforts on better selling applications such as DBExpert and the (surprise but rather temporary) popularity of Junk Spy also consumed most of the developers time alongside problems the company had after moving the project to VisualAge C++ v4 so Relish 2.3 was actually never delivered but a alpha/beta version was shown as late as 2004. But amongst the updated features were TCP/IP support, vCard and vCalendar support, Palm Pilot support, log-style notes, area code lookup and enhanced phone call support.

The company had looked into porting the application to Windows but Relish is so tightly integrated into the OS/2 WPS that it would have required a complete rewrite.

RelishNet
A multi-user version of Relish that works over a network and has group scheduling features, it can use either a client/server or a peer-to-peer model. RelishNet adds the concepts of People, Places, and Things to the model used by the single user Relish. People are individuals who share your Relish network, Places are actual locations and Things are items that have schedules maintained with Relish.

RelishWeb
Add-on package for Relish or RelishNet that allows you to publish reports as web pages.

Versions

 * Relish v1 (1987)
 * Relish v2.12
 * Relish v2.2 (1994)
 * Partly rewritten using SOM, adds a "Buns" feature


 * Relish 2.23
 * Last known version (except for 2.3 beta)


 * RelishWeb v1.0 (1997)

Prerequisites

 * Relish 2.23 requires OS/2 version 2.1 or higher.
 * RelishWeb requires OS/2 v3 or later and a copy of Relish 2.23

Known issues

 * "Type-to-search" and the find feature in general do not work on OS/2 Warp Version 4 with Fixpacks 1, 2 or 3, it is fixed in Fixpak 4 and later.
 * Early Trident 9440 or 9680 video card/chipsets drivers and some early Matrox drivers cause the system to crash if Relish is started, this is a buggy driver issue and should not be present in a modern setting but if you experience it download more recent drivers.
 * CodeSmith Xit interferes with the menu operation of Relish, add RELISH.EXE to the exception list in Xit to fix this.

Publications

 * Luc Van Bogaert: An archive copy of a Sundial Relish review - (1999 The Warped Site!)
 * Nicolas Petreley: A mini-review of Relish 2.2 - InfoWorld (Apr 1995)
 * Another mini-review of Relish 2.2 - PC Magazine (Apr 1996)
 * Chris Wenham: Relish 2.2 review - 1997 from OS/2 eZine

Licence and availability
Discontinued commercial software, it appears to be available for purchase from a couple of places but there is no support available from the company any more.
 * Author: Dr. Randell S. Flint (Sundial Systems)

Links

 * Archive copy of the Relish product page - 2006 - via Archive.org
 * Relish at BMT Micro
 * IRC Logs
 * Archive of the IRC chat after the OS/2 VOICE presentation: 1999-02-01, 1999-12-06