Ideal Calendar Review

Wait up - dont throw out that paper agenda book just yet!

Submitted by HuggableHoney on Wed, 2008-10-29 23:18.
Author's Product Rating:
Ease of Use: 
Effectiveness: 
Help/Support: 
The lowest price: 18$
You can buy it at RegNow for that price.
Pros:
Easy to use - click on a date and up pops the "add occasion" box, tabbed months, menu displayed on top bar
Cons:
Too many options at times (eg. the colors of all of the events), the watermark in the back occludes the view of the middle dates, in the default window size you can only view the first 3 events entered (therefore you need to resize the window), watermark occludes view, nonideal default settings on startup, the interface is not very appealing, the export option does not allow exporting data to other commonly used calendars
Review:

If I had a choice between an old fashioned paper agenda book and this calendar, I would choose the paper agenda book hands down! This calendar is easy to use, but not very ideal in the sense that there are too many options on the popup menus (it looks like they have all been cluttered in), its not very pretty, the interface looks cluttered and the defualt options have not been thought out very much (for instance the default font colors are difficult to read and remember). Some features such as the option to color different events in different colors seem useless since its difficult to remember what all the different colors represent (how can one remember that a special occasion is green, a birthday is black and a meeting is blue)! In this respect the program could be improved by possibly adding a legend on the bottom or in a margin to indicate what the colors mean. The calendar holiday images are not transparent enough nor is the watermark that is displayed in the back of the calender. Furthermore, when holiday names are displayed the font is not changeable and the size is quite large. There should be an option to be able to upload your own images instead of the predefined holiday images. The default settings of this program make the calendar look ugly and while with a bit of playing around with fonts, resizing and changing of settings you could get it to look a little more appeasing, the time is really not worth the effort because when you close and reopen the program a lot of the settings need to be reset! It is nice that this program lets you export information as a CSV file (ie. a comma separated value file), but it would be more useful if it allowed you to export the information to a common program such as outlook or google calendar - this would then allow you to share your calendar with family, friends, business mates etc thereby increasing its utility.

Conclusion:

Overall, I think this program could be improved in many ways and as it stands right now, I do not think I would pay to have this program. It seems like it would take more time to learn it than to use a standard program like outlook. Plus, the interface for outlook is easy to use and uses common shortcuts that windows uses (making my learning curve a lot less steep) which this program does not. A must buy - NOT.