PandoCalendar
July 7, 2007
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Generally speaking, OS X has been rock solid for me — with one glaring exception. Some time ago iCal died. One day it launched and immediately quit again, and it’s been like that ever since.
At first I sent off the crash logs to Apple, but I don’t bother now. I’ve searched through those logs but it’s all double-Dutch to me. A little research revealed that I might be missing an important system font — no, it’s there; or that some background tweak is clashing with iCal — no, if I start as another user with nothing loaded it still crashes.
My hunch, and there’s nothing scientific about this, is that I installed a trial version of Photoshop 7 at one stage and that modified the system in some way that killed iCal.
The long and the short of it is that iCal is gone so from time to time I’ve tried other free OSX calendars. One was Sunbird (ugly), one was Google Calendar (works best with Firefox, which I hate, and only when connected), and PandoCalendar.
I quite like PandoCalendar. It’s a little bit funky for my liking, but that’s easily fixed by going into the preferences and changing a few fonts and colors. There are no week or day views, only the whole month is shown; hover over a marked day to see a speech bubble pop up with the day’s tasks and appointments.
I really like how it can be configured to speak the appointments as well. Love that.
Appointments are quite clunky to set; after clicking a date, you click for a new appointment and then manually enter the start time. It would be really cool to be able to select the hour or minute and then spin the mouse wheel to change the value. See, I’m already spoiled by iPhone!
It is subtle enough that I will probably keep it running in the background for reminders related to operation of the Mac itself; I have a (forgive me) Dell VGA PDA for my regular scheduling.
