ThisWeek version 2.4 -- Week at a time Datebook

OVERVIEW

ThisWeek gives you a weekly view of your appointments in a manner similar to weekly planners. Each day is a listbox of appointments for the day which can be selected and automatically bought up in the Daily view of DateBook. ThisWeek is intended as a front end to DateBook, and usually is used to launch DateBook to the appointment of interest. Re-program your hardware DateBook button to call this ThisWeek, and then launch DateBook from ThisWeek.

INSTALLATION

Follow the standard PalmPilot installation procedure for ThisWeek:

First, unzip THISWEEK.ZIP somewhere on your PC or Mac. Then from Windows, run the PALMPILOT INSTALL TOOL program which will be in the same group as your PalmPilot Desktop application. When the install dialog comes up, click on the BROWSE button and navigate to the directory where you unzipped the THISWEEK.PRC file. Select THISWEEK.PRC by double-clicking it in the FILE OPEN dialog and then click on the INSTALL button. On the next HotSync, the ThisWeek application will appear in your list of applications.

I strongly suggest that you then fire up the Prefs application on your PalmPilot, go to the Buttons dialog, and reset the DateBook button to call ThisWeek instead of DateBook. ThisWeek acts as a front end to DateBook, then you can push into DateBook to do stuff.

ThisWeek creates a small database on your Palm Pilot with registration information, and your preferences. It does NOT modify for your DateBook database.

This program only works on PalmOS 3.0 or greater due to differences in the DateBook format in v2.0 which I cannot yet figure out. The program will warn you and exit if you try and run on an older platform.

SHAREWARE REGISTRATION

There are several ways to register this shareware program:

1) Go to www.palmgear.com and register on-line, where they can take the usual credit cards and such. They also handle phone orders at 800 741-9070 or fax at 817 640-6614. They can handle getting you the registration code.

2) Send a check or money order for $12 to:

    Rick Eesley
    1804 Middle Road
    Martinsville, NJ  08836 (USA)

Include an email address or return address so I can mail you the code to enter in the shareware screen. If there are problems contact me via Email at: reesley@eclipse.net.

OPERATION

Main Screen

The main screen of ThisWeek is 6 list boxes filled with appointments for Mon, Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, and the weekend. Each appointment has the time of the appointment and some of the text. If you select an appointment more of its text is displayed at the bottom of the screen. Repeating appointments are preceded with a '+' sign. Appointments on the weekend are preceded with SA: for Saturday appointments, and SU: for Sunday appointments. To select an appointment just click on it.

After selecting an appointment you can automatically launch DateBook or ToDo to that day by clicking on the button marked DbTd or clicking on the day buttons (ie: "Fri Mar 23" button). If a item from your ToDo list is selected you will go to ToDo, otherwise you will go to DateBook. If no appointments are selected then you will go to today. One bit of weirdness, if you have selected a repeating appointment you will go to the next possible occurence of that appointment. This can be unnerving if the repeating appointment was on a Tuesday, and today is Wednesday, you will go to Tuesday of NEXT week.

Due to limitations in DateBook, it is ONLY possible to launch to an appointment, you cannot go to an arbitrary day. For this reason, ThisWeek will launch to the current day if you don't have an appointment selected -- even though you may click on a different date. Although some other programs create a fake empty appointment and launch to that, I have chosen not to do that because it leaves garbage in your DateBook and because I don't want to write to your DateBook database - I currently treat it as Read-Only. ThisWeek cannot possibly screw up you datebook information.

The other buttons on the screen move you ahead or back a week, they are '<' for backwards, '>' for ahead, and '=' to bring up the standard Pilot date selector. You can also use the scrolling hardware button to go forward and backward a week. The equivalent commands can be picked off the menu also.

ThisWeek now displays dated appointments from your ToDo database. This feature can be turned off from the main menu by clicking the "Disable Todo" menu item. You may want to turn it off if you have a lot of ToDo items and this is affecting the performance of ThisWeek. This preference will be remembered next time you launch the application.

ThisWeek now can display a year at a time, in the year view. There are two ways to get to this view. The current year display at the top of the main screen is now a button, click on it and the year will be displayed. You can also select the year view from the Menu.

Year Screen

The Year view screen displays a half year at a time. This view comes up in the current year, with the current month on the screen. There are several ways to move around this view. Use the '<' and '>' to change the year. Use the hardware up and down keys to scroll the months, if you scroll past the end of this year, the year is advanced to the next year. Use the scroll bar to move the display up and down. Finally, click on the Done button when you are finished.

Shareware Screen

The shareware screen comes up when you click on the menu button, and select the shareware menu, or after using the unregistered tool for awhile it will appear when you click a button to take you to the DateBook application or click Shareware from the menu. The screen is just a reminder that you should register the tool. If you want to register then type in your registration code, and if things go well you'll never see the screen again. If you don't want to register just click Done and then click a DateBook button and you will go there. In other words, the shareware screen does not stop you from doing anything, it just bugs you.

Options Screen

An options screen has been added which supports control over four options. The first option is whether ThisWeek should display dated ToDo items in the weekly view. The default is to display them. The second option is when week 1 of the year starts. By default, week 1 is the week that Jan 1st falls on. It can be changed to be the week after this which matches the week number in the weekly view of DateBook. I made the default different than DateBook because my weekly planner (and a few others I checked) have week 1 as the week that Jan 1 falls in. Another option allows you to set where appointments without a time go in the list, by default they go in the beginning of the list (like DateBook). If you check this box they will go to the end of the list of appointments for each day.

There is now an option to launch TodoPlus, and enhanced version of the built in ToDo application. Its a nice application, I recommend it. If you check this option, but ToDoPlus is not installed, ThisWeek will just launch the built in ToDo with a warning. The final option reads "Undated Appt's Last" which affects the sort order of appointments in the list boxes of appointments. By default, appointments without a time are first in the list of appointments, when this option is checked they are moved to the end of the list.

LIMITATIONS

The maximum number of apppointments per day is 30, any further will be ignored. As mentioned earlier, ThisWeek can only launch Datebook to a selected appointment or the current day (today).

SUPPORT

If you have any problems or questions about this product or suggestions for improvements, please send them in an email to reesley@eclipse.net

RELEASES

v2.4

- Added the year at a time view, see the documentation above for details.

v2.3

- Cleaned up memory a little more, worth a release.

v2.2

- Fixed a bug...if a user had the ToDoPlus option selected but ToDoPlus not installed on their Palm device; when the user try to launch ToDoPlus ThisWeek would do nothing and give no error message. In release 2.2, if the ToDoPlus option is selected but there is no ToDoPlus to launch, ThisWeek just launches the built-in ToDo application and issues a warning.

v2.1

- Converted documentation to HTML and updated it some.

v2.0

- Ported to OS3.5 (also backwards compatible with older Palm OS'es back to version 3.0. This new SDK allows me to test on Palm OS platforms from OS3.0 to OS3.5 and on hardware platforms from Palm III's to Palm VII's. This should help to avoid some of the disasters I had with version 1.9.

- Converted code base to C++, again to help me maintain the code better.

v1.10 Bug Fix

- A bug fix again ... appointments longer than 128 characters could cause a Fatal Exception, often requiring a reset. I am embarrased!

v1.9 Enhancements

- Appointments are now sorted by time. In the the past they were sorted by time, but FIRST they were sorted by whether they were repeating and whether they had a time - so all the repeating appointments came first, regardless of their time. Now they are sorted by time of day. There is an option added which allows the user to pick whether appointments without a time go to the beginning or the end of the appointments list. By default, they go to the beginning which is like DateBook does.

v1.9 Bugs Fixed

- There was a bug that caused a fatal reset when there were appointments with text longer than 200 characters. This bug was not consistent, so you may not have seen even though you have long appointments. Tools like ACT! and OutLook make long records, so users who use these program were particularly susceptible to this problem.

- There was a bug for appointments that repeat MONTHLY, where they repeat every N months (where N > 1). When occuring, the repeating appointment would show up randomly.

v1.9 Notes

- I have decided to discontiue support of the Portuguese version of ThisWeek, it has not generated one sale. I was under the impression that a group of users would buy it if I made the effort, and none did.

v1.8 Enhanchements

- Made a minor speed improvement for people who have many appointments. Also made the program smaller from 14K to 13K by cleaning up some duplicate code and combining some strings.

v1.7 Enhancements

- Made a major performance improvement for users who have MANY appointments in their DateBook. This was done by filtering out appointments not during the current week before decoding the appointments.

v1.7 Update

- CHanged my address (I moved due to enormous revenue generated with ThisWeek).

v1.6 Enhancements

- ThisWeek has been extended to read the ToDo database and display any records with a date. These records are displayed AFTER the DateBook appointments, since they have no time (just a date). This feature can be enabled or disabled in the menu. By default it is enabled, you may want to disable if you keep a LOT of todo items and this is slowing you down.

- Now displays the week number on the main display after the year. Week 1 can be either the week that Jan 1st falls in, or the first full week of the year. Can be set in the options menu.

- Added support for secret records, which are not displayed if you turn of secret records in the Security application.

v1.6 Bugs Fixed

- If you displayed a secret record and then launched DateBook to it the DateBook application might hang the system.

v1.5 Enhancements

- Added a new button and menu entry to allow the user to go to a week chosen by using the Palm Calendar dialog.

v1.4 Bugs Fixed

- Fixed a bug with cancelled dates (they were not cancelled before).

- Fixed a bug that left the text in the current appointment field even when you changed weeks. The field is now cleared.

- One more small performance enhancement, not sure how much difference it will make.

v1.3 Enhancements

- Made the program MUCH faster by changing how I go through datebook records.

v1.2 Bugs Fixed

- Version 1.1 introduced a bug that made weekends always blank. Sometimes the cure is worse than the original illness.

- Repeating weeks and days were not handled properly.

v1.2 Enhancements

- none

v1.1 Bugs Fixed

- Repeating alarms with an end date were not cancelled properly, possibly resulting in overflow for a given day if you had enough repeating alarms around.

- Entries with more than 30 characters were sometimes truncated improperly resulting in a Fatal Error. Ugly!

v1.1 Enhancements

- Added use of hardware scroll button

- Performance improved by only scanning appointment list for once each week, instead of once for each day of the week.