Text Options for the Visually Impaired Font Size: a-Decrease font size A+ Increase font size Color: A Change the color of the page to white on black A Change the color of the page to black on white A Change the color of the page to yellow on black Revert. Shop Target for Calendars you will love at great low prices. Free shipping on orders of $35+ or same-day pick-up in store. 2020 Calendar with US holidays - federal, catholic and other important dates. Free printable version available. Toggle navigation Toggle search box Calendar-12.com 12 months a year, day by day. Calendars 2020 Calendar 2021 Calendar 2022 Calendar October 2020; November 2020; December 2020.
High School Varsity Volleyball
Text Options for the Visually Impaired Font Size: a-Decrease font size A+ Increase font size Color: A Change the color of the page to white on black A Change the color of the page to black on white A Change the color of the page to yellow on black Revert. Shop Target for Calendars you will love at great low prices. Free shipping on orders of $35+ or same-day pick-up in store. 2020 Calendar with US holidays - federal, catholic and other important dates. Free printable version available. Toggle navigation Toggle search box Calendar-12.com 12 months a year, day by day. Calendars 2020 Calendar 2021 Calendar 2022 Calendar October 2020; November 2020; December 2020.
High School Varsity Volleyball
Grace Christian at Community Christian (Peace Church), 5 p.m.
High School Varsity Girls Tennis
Ridgecroft at …
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Function: iCal replacement with linear timeline display.
Developer: Little Maruader
Price: $19
Requirements: Mac OS X 10.6.
Trial: Fully-featured (30 days)
I was intrigued by the calendar program Caliander. I wanted to try it. Now thatI have done so, I confess I don't understand it. Nonetheless, it might be foryou if you find its unique user interface helpful.
Caliander offers a different means for visualizing information. Basically, itrotates iCal 90 degrees. iCal presents information vertically: the lower an itemis, the later it is. Caliander presents it horizontally: the further right anitem is, the later it is.
But Caliander also stratifies the information vertically. The reason isapparent. If the time line it used just ran from left to right, earlier tolater, it would stretch out too long for even the largest monitor. So entriesare bars running left to right through time, and then top to bottom. Anindividual item has a length correlating to the time amount of time allotted toit (note the compression feature that is available), and groups of items appeartop to bottom. So more items can be displayed at once than would be the case ifeverything were strung out along a single dimension.
As might be expected, it is easier to comprehend visually than verbally. Aglance will show the differences, especially if placed adjacent to iCal; thetrouble is a glance isn't sufficient to take in what the data actually shows inall its detail.
This is a moderately busy day when my nephew was visiting town: the mainevents were a Giants baseball game and Shakespeare's Taming of the Shrew atthe Marin Theatre.
This is the same day in a conventional iCal Day view.
It has one other 'trick' (the developer's word, not mine). The perceptual logmode, which is optional, compresses the future. According to the product Website, 'This means you'll see today's schedule in great detail, but still bereminded of all the things coming up in the next couple of days.'
The program does what it claims to do. But my reaction is that I don't need thatthing done. As I tried to use Caliander, I concluded I could not adapt. Perhapsit's me, not the program.
Here is background. I use BusyCal and iCal. I use BusyCal to sync with GoogleCalendar, and I use iCal set to a different time zone when I am on the road. Ihave about a dozen different calendars in active use, all color-coded, so I amable to distinguish between work, professional activities that are not part ofmy day job, my personal life, social occasions (meaning my wife is involved aswell), and so on. More than a dozen people have read-only access to thesecalendars, two people aside from me have write access, and my wife needs to seeeverything but wants to be able to switch off those items she is notparticipating in. In a typical day, I have a dozen appointments, and there isoften travel time between them, meaning it is not abnormal for a 24-hour periodto contain as many as two dozen entries. Beyond that, I keep track of a numberof events that I am not attending but need to know about, both because theyrelate to my responsibilities (e.g., a presentation I'd like to appear at, inorder to greet the speaker, if a moment frees up) and also out of interest(e.g., my college friend's puppet show is in town). All this means my calendaris packed, and it fills up weeks in advance.
Accordingly, when I consult BusyCal or iCal or Google Calendar, I am trying todo one of two things. It's pretty simple. Either on the one hand I need to knowwhat I am supposed to be doing at X o'clock or I am trying to find blank spacerepresenting free time in order to slot in Y event. Occasionally, I am playingwith the calendar just for the aesthetic recreation; that happens rarely and,anyway, there is only so much pleasure to be had from moving around virtualblocks to form a pretty pattern.
My conclusion is that Caliander did not work well for either use. I could notread it without effort to see what I was supposed to be doing at X o'clock. Ialso could not see the blank space representing free time in order to slot in Yevent.
Calendar 1 1 2 1 Press
To be fair, I tried for only two business days before reverting to BusyCal andiCal. I believe the reasons it was difficult were the two-dimensionality of thecalendar, such that I had to read left to right and top to bottomsimultaneously; and the intrusion of the words themselves, which meant thatsometimes I was looking at a little speck of an event (15 minutes of travel)with explanatory text that took up much more real estate.
As I experimented with Caliander, I wondered what design experts would have tosay about its look. Someone such as Edward Tufte, who wrote The Visual Displayof Quantitative Information,likely would not be enamored of this format. The reason is it requires too muchconcentration to decipher. There is a reason that calendars look as they do.Clarity is a great virtue.
Calendar 1/1/2000
Caliander reminds me of the novelty clocks that you see now and then, the onesthat display the time in base-two or with a series of colors. I never understoodthem, literally. I would have to look and ponder, and it's not worth the effortwhen the simple goal is to determine when to leave the house.
I was also reminded of Gantt charts. If you've ever done project management,chances are you have seen a Gantt chart. It shows a project as separate tasks,running as bars left to right through time just as Caliander does. Therelationships between tasks, whether they are sequential or parallel, can bedepicted. Unlike a Gantt chart, however, Caliander shows only that time has beenblocked out, and it doesn't show how items interact with each other. Even if itcould, it's difficult to imagine a life that required such complexity for adaily task list. (If I were trying to devise a new means of showing a day, forthe sake of originality, I'd do it using a pie chart corresponding to a clock.That would match another means we have of depicting time, namely using a circle.There's an idea, for free, for some developer to try out!)
Caliander does have more to it. It allows the creation of new items using ashortcut and a natural English description. The syntax matters. It appears toput the item into the right place (meaning the right time) only if the date andtime are specified at the beginning of the description, rather than the end. Theshortcut also works without Caliander being open and the frontmost application.
I found that Caliander and iCal synced seamlessly. If you entered new events toone, they appeared in the other just about instantly, and edits were made withthe same immediacy. Thus, you could use Caliander and iCal together.
Finally, I feel obligated to note that when I was playing around with theprogram, I found that trying to display dates several months in the past broughton the spinning beach ball of non-responsiveness. In general, the programappeared to be stable, but it has not reached the stage of development ofBusyCal.
In conclusion, this is a piece of software that benefits from the demo mode. Myadvice is to download it, try it out for a bit, and see if you like thegraphical user interface. The reason to buy it is the display. If it works foryou, terrific. If it doesn't, then there isn't much of a point.
Copyright © 2011 Frank H. Wu. Reviewing in ATPM is open to anyone. Ifyou're interested, write to us at reviews@atpm.com.
