About Active Desktop Calendar

Summary: Fully customizable calendar with notes/appointments, tasks, alarms and contacts. It features seamless integration and interactivity with a desktop wallpaper, shares calendar layers in a local network and displays data directly from Outlook.

Average computer user will find calendar as a component of many applications on his machine, but chances are good that he will stay unsatisfied with all of them. Usually made just to be there, those calendars are either too complicated or too many clicks away, or even both. What if you wanted just a simple old-fashioned calendar, to show you dates and days of the week, without making big fuss? Well, stir in a bit of notebook, a piece of to-do list, some alarms, comprehensive address book and sophisticated desktop interactivity, and you will end up here, with Active Desktop Calendar, a thoughtfully designed organizer you were looking for all the time.

The basic idea standing behind this program is very simple. In our 3D world, logical place for a calendar is hanging on the wall, or sitting somewhere on top of the desk. Active Desktop Calendar is aiming right in that direction by placing a calendar on your machine's desktop wallpaper. Of course, that means you will have to sacrifice some desktop space, and maybe rearrange a couple of icons, but you will be able to fine tune the appearance of this calendar to get good compromise on those issues.

When you start Active Desktop Calendar, it will replace existing wallpaper with new bitmap made of previous wallpaper enriched with calendar elements, and place its icon in systray. That icon is actually a number representing current day of the month and, of course, serves to access application's user interface. Double-click on it, and you will find yourself straight in the notes/alarms view of the program. On the other hand, right-click brings up a menu with several items to choose from, and, if ever needed, option to exit application is one of them.

With or without calendar elements, wallpaper is always just a bitmap, meaning that nothing can be done directly on the screen, right? Wrong. Active Desktop Calendar is an interactive desktop application! If that option is enabled, you will be able to interact with Active Desktop Calendar in absolutely effortless fashion. Double-click on a date in calendar and you are already writing a note for it, double-click on any note to edit it, or double-click on tasks list to update it. It's that simple.

Multiuser support allows each user that logs in to the computer with her/his own username and password to have separate calendar data set (notes, tasks, alarms, contacts) along with one common data set that is shared with all other users. This option is useful even on single user computers because you can maintain two separate data sets, for example one private and the other for business. Pay attention to the title bar of the main program window and you will see current user and data set info.

Data layers allow you to group your calendar data (e.g. personal notes, business notes, public holidays, birthdays, ...) and if your computer is networked you will be able to share those layers with other people while remaining the only one who can change information stored in them. You can also export and import data in CSV and iCal formats.

Integration with Outlook is something special. When you enable it Active Desktop Calendar starts reading appointments and tasks directly from Outlook and shows them on the desktop together with information from other data layers you have. It can not get simpler than that.

Google Calendar integration allows you to display events from your own and other Google Calendars. The option for importing contacts supports Outlook, Outlook Express and Windows Address Book. You can also import/export contacts to an XML file.

Ok, enough said about general principles behind the program. Now when you have it installed on your machine we are sure you will catch all its specialties in no time. We will just let you have the pleasure of exploring it, and hope for love at first sight. Your comments and questions are more than welcome. Feel free to contact XemiComputers at info@xemico.com and we will be happy to hear from you. Oh, yes, one more thing, we have additional icon libraries for changing Active Desktop Calendar's looks waiting for you at its homepage.