Mac fans get organised as ProVue tweaks the iPod

One thing Steve Jobs, head of Apple Computer, insists on is that the company is not going to make a PDA (personal digital assistant) to compete with Palm or PocketPC. He says it's a crowded market where profit margins are already vanishing, and that's not where he wants to be.

Even so, many Apple users really want the company to introduce a PDA to follow its Newton (killed by Jobs on his return to Apple in 1997). When Apple said in October it was going to introduce a "breakthrough digital device", many expected a PDA. It turned out to be the iPod MP3 player.

But software is malleable and programmers are ingen-ious. At the MacWorld Expo last month in San Francisco, people were using their iPods as PDAs, with contact names and numbers in place of music titles. How? By fooling the iPod into thinking the contacts were details of very small MP3 files.

The company that achieved this is ProVue Development, which makes a database called Panorama. James Rea, its president, had a brainstorm after the iPod's release; he realised that the "tags" containing meta-information about MP3 files (artist's name, album, music genre – there are eight in all) could hold contact details. Hence the Panorama iPod Organizer. Since announcing the idea in December, the company has had a blizzard of requests from would-be buyers, Rea says. "It seems we've hit a nerve."

No tinkering with the iPod is required, he says. Even smarter is that, as no music need be attached to the contact details, a huge number of contacts take up a trivial amount of the 5Gb hard disk; ProVue reckons that storing 1,000 contacts will use less than 0.1 per cent of an iPod's hard-drive space. At 5Mb, that sounds a lot, but it's about five minutes of music on a machine can store 80 hours' worth.

It can only be a matter of time before someone puts a calendar on in the same way. Which would make everyone happy: Apple fans will have a PDA without Steve Jobs having to build one.