14 DAY TRIAL // Time is extremely precious nowadays. One of my greatest desires is the day to be expanded to 48 hours so that I could do all my work. Another way to succeed in doing everything you plan is to know your own capabilities and to make a thorough analysis and programming of the tasks at hand. This way you will be able to do all your biddings.
In a couple of words this means project management and the better you plan your activities the more chances are to accomplish them. Planning involves risk analysis and estimating the time to complete an activity. So you will need a calendar. There are plenty of those on the Internet and some of them are great tools to remind you to do something or simply to append an activity.
MonoCalendar is a very simple to use calendar that can help you plan your activities and squeeze a whole days' work into a very nicely drawn page. There is no cost involved, this meaning that you can use it anywhere you want, no strings attached.
The interface is eye-soothing and simple enough for a kid to handle it. The colors, hues and shadows made me think of Vista as the contemporary look displayed is truly amazing. There is nothing out of place and the multiple calendars feature lets you add many tasks for different activities.
In the right hand side of the application window there are the calendars. By default, you will have Personal and Work to juggle with. You can add as many as you think you need without any problem and name them the way you want. A number of downsides are encountered in this section. There is no context menu available and once you created and named the calendars the only way to change that is by deleting them (select and press Delete), and thus losing all the append activities and creating a new one.
Also, the colors for differentiating the calendars (and events/tasks) are selected by the software and the user has no word in this matter. The different views of the calendar are limited to day, an entire week or month. If all the calendars are checked, then all the tasks added by the user will be displayed. By un-checking a calendar the activities it included will be hidden from view.
Day view displays all the activities for the selected day and activities can be appended at certain hours. A bit restrictive is the fact that they cannot be added to a specific time of the day and minutes are not involved. The user has the option of setting the duration of the day (default is 8:00 to 18:00) but the tasks and activities cannot be set to last one hour and 20 minutes and adding multiple tasks in the same time interval is impossible.
Such a schedule however is possible as the hour interval is split in two and moving the task on the separating line between 3 and 4 for instance will result in scheduling the task at exactly 3:15. Moving it on the lower half of the 3-4 time interval will set the activity at 3:30. This is one aspect you will have to discover by yourselves as the information is not available (no Help menu and no tips available).
A minor glitch that may not be to the like of most of the users (me included) is that the calendars can be added only by going to File menu and selecting the new Calendar option. Adding a new event however does not work in the same way as using New Event option in File is useless (take the fast lane and double click somewhere in the calendar to add it).
The importing and exporting capabilities can be used to create backups of your calendar. The saving format is .ics and each calendar will be exported separately. When retrieving them from the HDD one difference can be noted: the original color is not preserved and will be changed.
Preferences menu is as poor as the number of features available at a first glance of the software. The three tabs cover calendar, language and advanced options. Calendar is by far the richest menu and the sections available include setting the time format (12 or 24 hour format), set the number of days per week (7 or 5, depending on how much you work), setting the first day of the week (not everywhere the week starts with the Sunday break), setting the day duration and setting translucency (during our testing this feature was impaired). Advanced tab lets the user set the update search frequency and enable the notification icon of MonoCalendar in system tray.
The Good
The interface is definitely something. It is very nicely drawn and the effort deserves our appreciation. Importing and exporting options are very useful for backup purposes.
The Bad
There are too few features available and some of them are not even working (translucency and adding events from File menu).
The Truth
Nice looking but lacks too many options and features like a simple audio alert when it is time for an event. But due to the fact that the application is at the beginning you have to give it the benefit of the doubt and try it for a while. Future versions may include a series of options meant to improve its functionality.
Here are some snapshots of the application in action:
