VERY comprehensive program, you will be amazed! (digiguide.com)

Member Name: marktjones

Product:	digiguide.com
Date:	15/01/01 (46 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Reminds you about programs, shows you all episodes of chosen programmes, easy to use, good descriptions for each programme

Disadvantages: pay £5 for no nag screens, but IMO, it's worth it

Having recently been recommended ‘DigiGuide’ from a friend, I decided to give it a try, as it claimed to be a replacement for the ‘Radio Times’ and newspapers. To download it, you simply go to www.digiguide.co.uk, and go to the download section to get it. The file size is only about 1MB (I.E. 5 Minutes on a normal 56k dial-up modem), so it is quick to get. You then just follow the instructions and Windows will do the rest for you. It then asks you what channels you want to be in your program (includes SkyDigital, NTL, ONdigital etc) and fill in a few details (You fill in your name and address as I recall, but they don’t send you anything).

You now get into the main part of the program, you click a channel on the bar to your left, and you can see that the programme names and times are all laid out as in a newspaper, with a full description of each programme (better than most daily newspapers). You can have it store for you up to 14 days of programming, every 2 or 3 days when you go into DigiGuide; it will ask you if you want to download new listings. You simply pick yes, and it does the rest for you.

[I have taken two screen-shots of this program and uploaded them, to show you the interface, as this is important for any program that you will use a lot. I have included the “planner view” and the “daily view”. Just copy-and-paste the links to your address bar: (1) – http://www.ukpsx.f2s.com/planner.gif (2) - http://www.ukpsx.f2s.com/daily.gif *each picture is approximately 50k in size, so ought to take around 10 seconds to download on a 56k modem*]

Where this program excels over normal listings magazines, it that it has a search facility, so if you for example wanted to know when the next episode of ‘The Simpsons’ is on(and all the rest of the episodes up to 14 days in advance), you go to the search tab, and write it in. Almost immediately it will come up with dates, t
imes and descriptions of each episode. If you decide that you particularly like some programme, you can right-click it and choose ‘make a favourite’, so whenever you go into DigiGuide, and go to the “what’s on view” tab, it will show you when the next episode is on.

If you think you will forget when something you want to watch is on, and inadvertently miss it, because you are working on your computer, then that is no problem, because if you right-click a programme and select “remind me”, a pop-up message will appear 5 minutes before the show starts, which I personally use all the time, because I think that this is DigiGuide’s best feature. (It is able to remind you because a little icon sits in the system tray, running quietly in the background, but don’t worry, as it seems to take up negligible memory, as I have never notice it slow anything down)

Another useful feature is you can do a “smart search”, where you enter a keyword like ‘football’, and in your “what’s on view” tab, you will find every football match being played in the next two weeks! (On the channels that you specified on installation). This isn’t limited to sports either, as every programme in the Guide has a category, so you could instead for “comedy films” and that would work just as well!.

If you prefer the view that you have on the SkyDigital EPG, then that is possible too, you just choose “planner view” on the top tab, and it will show you what is on now, next and after for all the channels in one go.

Other features worthy of note are being able to download new colour schemes, change the colour that different categories are highlighted and change the channels that you want at any time.

This program is Shareware, which means you can keep it for free, but it will nag you every once per hour, or you could register your copy (O
nly £5 for a full year), this will get rid of the nag screens, and entitle you to newer releases of DigiGuide as and when they are launched. I registered on the day of downloading it because I was so impressed.

Overall, I do think that it is a viable replacement to newspapers, as it offers all the things that papers do, plus the extra dimension of interactivity. I would definitely recommend this program to anyone.

Summary: