The iCal challenge
Eight calendars and organizers compete with Apple’s scheduling app
by William Porter, Macworld.com
Woody Allen famously quipped that 80 percent of success is showing up.
If your life is ruled by appointments, then you need a good calendaring
program like Apple’s iCal. On the other hand, the big problem for some
people isn’t showing up—it’s getting things done. If you’re one of
these folks, your life is ruled by deadlines, and meeting those
deadlines involves juggling many projects and priorities.
While
the calendar-oriented person can’t be in two places at once, the
task-oriented person could well be working on three (or 13) projects
simultaneously. For the task-oriented person, 80 percent of success is
managing competing demands on time, and you may need more power and
flexibility than iCal’s to-do list provides. And then there is a third
group of people whose obligations are fairly balanced between an
overwhelming welter of tasks (with or without deadlines) and a
never-ending list of appointments. These poor folks need all the help
they can get.
We reviewed nine programs:
These
apps tend to fall into one of three categories: calendars, task
managers, or hybrids. Six of the nine programs are heavy on calendar
features and lighter on task management. Four of those six are Mac
desktop applications (iCal, SOHO Organizer, Now Up-to-Date, and
Sunbird); the other two are online calendar programs. One of the nine
programs (What ToDo) is mainly a project- and taskmanagement tool with
few calendar features. Finally, two programs—Daylite and Contactizer
Pro—try to do everything: organize calendars, manage projects and
tasks, and much more. Be aware that while we reviewed the latest
versions of these applications, some of them are updated frequently,
and the versions reviewed here might have been updated since we went to
press.
iCal
is all about intelligent and attractive presentations. The Day view
nicely accommodates multiple concurrent events. The Week view shows you
all your appointments and deadlines in easy-to-read, color-coded blocks.
The iCal Standard
Comparing these programs is a bit tricky, because they are all pretty
good and each serves a somewhat different set of needs. Let’s take
Apple’s iCal as a starting point, since it’s free from the maker of Mac
OS, and it’s an excellent program. The question is, do you need
anything other than iCal? The answer may indeed be yes. While all of
these programs are great for individuals, three of them (Daylite, Now
Up-to-Date, and Contactizer Pro) are designed for multiple users and
really shine in collaborative environments.
Calendars
Apple’s iCal is very easy to use and yet
remarkably versatile. You can create as many calendars as you like. You
can ask iCal to notify you before an event occurs via e-mail or a
pop-up alert. If you want to invite a couple of colleagues to a
meeting, iCal can automatically get their e-mail addresses from OS X’s
Address Book; also, the invitees will automatically have access to any
documents you attach to an event. You can easily sync iCal with your
iPhone or iPod. You can also share calendars easily on a peer-to-peer
network or even by putting your calendar on a calendar server. While
you can sync your calendar to your MobileMe account, at press time the
service did not support syncing events in calendars you’ve subscribed
to or published. In Leopard, you can even create iCal events and tasks
while you are using Mail, and Mail’s data detectors will help you pull
appointment information from an incoming message. In short, iCal does
most of what you’d want a calendar to do.
SOHO
Organizer’s interface is soothingly familiar, yet it is much more
powerful than iCal’s. For example, you can create new tabs showing
widely separated months, and switch between each view with a click.
Or
maybe not. SOHO Organizer’s creators felt that they could ask a
calendar to do even more. As a calendar, its advantages over iCal may
seem minor. SOHO Organizer provides some customized printing options
that iCal lacks. The calendar in SOHO Organizer supports a variety of
international calendar types; in addition to the standard Gregorian
calendar, SOHO Organizer also supports Buddhist, Hebrew, and Islamic
calendar formats. And SOHO Organizer’s calendar has more display
options than iCal has. But you have to step outside the calendar grid
to see the most compelling advantages of SOHO Organizer. In an office
environment, both iCal and SOHO Organizer calendars can be shared among
users, but SOHO Organizer has been designed with more thought to
multiuser access.
SOHO Organizer’s strength lies principally in the interoperability of
its calendar, address book, and SOHO Notes. The SOHO Organizer contacts
screen lets you see all events (appointments and tasks) associated with
a particular contact, although in iCal you can quickly search the
calendar by attendee name to get a similar result. But the real power
of SOHO Organizer is the way it works with SOHO Notes. SOHO Organizer
provides two ways to write lengthy, free-form memos tied to specific
days: the daily journal and daily notes. It seems like one or the other
of these could be jettisoned, but Chronos seems to expect that you’ll
record things like your expenses in the daily notes, and use the
journal for more expansive entries. If you’re a note-writing kind of
person, then the SOHO Organizer suite might be just your thing.
If you’re looking for a calendar that’s both multiuser and
cross-platform, check out Now Software’s Now Up-to-Date & Contact,
two programs that come as a package. Now Up-to-Date & Contact is
basically a souped-up combination of Apple’s Address Book and iCal that
you can easily share on a network. Unfortunately, Now Up-to-Date &
Contact is showing its age. Now Software has been working on a
replacement called Nighthawk, which is still in beta at this writing.
Daylite cuts through the clutter with an organizer that combines the power of several programs into one tool.
Another
homely but capable calendar comes from the open-source folks at
Mozilla. Sunbird is pretty basic, and on the Mac, most folks will
probably be happier with iCal or another choice. Sunbird can’t connect
with other Mac programs and services such as Address Book or MobileMe.
Sunbird’s notifications are limited to on-screen pop-ups, and you can
only set one. But Sunbird has one nice trick. It supports add-ons, and
if you install the free Provider For Google Calendar add-on, you’ll be
able to get to your Google calendar from Sunbird, and vice versa; you
can then manage your calendars equally well from any location. Also,
like iCal, Sunbird is free.
Web-Based Services
If you don’t want—or can’t afford—to be tied to a single operating
system or computer, then you can access similar calendar and organizer
functions via your browser with Google and Yahoo calendars. These are
most similar to the calendars in iCal, SOHO Organizer, and Sunbird.
Both of these online calendars allow you to create multiple calendars,
invite guests, and receive notifications.
For people who work on multiple machines, the ability to
access your e-mail and calendar from any Internet-connected device
makes the online services irresistible. Yahoo’s calendar includes a
basic to-do list and notetaking feature not found in Google’s calendar.
Nonetheless, I prefer Google Calendar because I use Google Gmail for my
e-mail. Gmail can often recognize that an e-mail message is suggesting
an appointment and will offer a quick way to create an event in your
calendar. iCal can do something similar, but in iCal you have to hold
your mouse over that text.
Google Calendar lets you manage multiple color-coded calendars directly from your browser.
Gmail’s feature is a bit smarter. I sent myself a test message,
inviting myself to a meeting tomorrow, perhaps at 12:30, but suggesting
next Monday as an alternative, at 9:30 at the Starbucks in Casa Linda
Plaza. Mail’s data detectors recognized meeting tomorrow if I held the
cursor over that pair of words, but didn’t pick up the time later in
the sentence. Gmail, on the other hand, without prompting, suggested
creating an event. The event I created with a single click missed
meeting tomorrow and went instead for next Monday, but did effortlessly
pick up the time and the location. (Yahoo Mail has no similar feature.)
Google Calendar also can send an SMS (text) message to my cell phone to
notify me of upcoming events.
Getting Things Done
With the exception of Google’s
calendar, all of the programs mentioned so far have a limited
to-do–list or task-list feature. You can enter a task, assign it to a
calendar, give it a priority level, and check it off when it’s done,
but that’s about it. If you have more-complicated obligations to
manage, you need a more flexible tool.
What ToDo is a nifty project and task organizer that’s
designed along the lines of best-selling author David Allen’s Getting
Things Done (GTD) books. What ToDo tracks tasks, projects, and
contexts—broad classifications under which you can group tasks, such as
e-mails to send or phone calls to make.
What ToDo also allows you to group tasks (items) within
projects, organize them, give them priorities and due dates, and add
notes. What ToDo isn’t specifically a calendar application, although it
shows a mini-calendar in its Detail drawer that you can use to assign
deadline dates. It isn’t iCal-aware, and a task with a deadline won’t
automatically appear in your iCal calendar. For individual users, the
program’s simplicity may well be a plus. And aside from the lack of
integration with iCal, it has a very nice Mac OS X user interface. One
particular weakness of What ToDo is printing—What ToDo has no special
report layouts. Individual users may find that What ToDo works very
well as a complement to iCal.
Organize Everything
Now Upto-Date & Contact offers excellent cross-platform, multiuser calendaring and contact management.
If you need more power in both the calendar and task-management areas
than you can get from, say, iCal and What ToDo, don’t despair. A couple
of tools can help you get comprehensively organized. But be warned: you
might need help with the tools themselves.
The programs in the do-it-all category, Objective Decision’s
Contactizer Pro and Marketcircle’s Daylite, are Mac-only. Contactizer
Pro’s interface has a brushed-metal effect with a sleek, modernistic
feel; by comparison, the large, colorful icons in Daylite seem
old-fashioned. Looks aside, both programs are loaded with features.
Both manage calendars; track e-mail, projects, and associated tasks;
sync data with a variety of programs like iCal, Apple Mail, and more;
cooperate with programs like iChat and Skype; print reports in a
variety of formats; and much more. Contactizer Pro’s design seems more
conventional: it tracks contacts (people), projects, tasks, and
communications, and the links between these entities seem natural.
Contactizer Pro is the easier of the two to learn without
consulting the manual—which is lucky for users, since there is no
manual. Contactizer Pro takes a peer-to-peer approach to sharing data
between users: there’s no server, something that Objective Decision
touts as an advantage. Technically, it may be an advantage for a
three-person shop. But for larger workgroups, Daylite’s client-server
approach is probably more efficient.
Daylite’s approach to linking data is more free-form and
takes some getting used to, and it definitely has some quirks. If you
create a new task while you’re looking at the Notes screen, when you
then click on OK and save your task, you won’t see it automatically.
You have to switch to the Tasks view and select the My Tasks item in
the Tasks index pane. This may be disconcerting for novices.
Daylite’s calendaring module seems weaker than Contactizer
Pro’s; you can’t, for example, duplicate an appointment in Daylite by
option-dragging it to another day, the way you can in Contactizer Pro,
iCal, or Now Up-to-Date & Contact. In other respects, Daylite has
an even richer feature set than Contactizer Pro, and it is amazingly
configurable.
Using a contact as a filter, Contactizer Pro lets you see only those events associated with that particular contact.
Daylite comes with excellent documentation, as well as instructive
sample databases that show how the program can be set up to suit the
needs of different kinds of businesses—a law office, for example. One
thing I especially liked about Daylite, or would if I were a boss
trying to run a tight ship, is that it lets you define customized
pipelines. A pipeline is something like a series of steps that are
normally followed as a project progresses from start to finish. For
example, a wedding photographer might first need to meet with the
bride, then send the contract, and so on. Daylite also tracks
opportunities as a special entity.
Both Daylite and Contactizer Pro are really multiuser
business applications. Getting the most out of them is going to take
some effort. But if you need the features and are willing to commit to
the learning curve, either program would be suitable for a busy
independent consultant or freelancer.
Macworld’s Buying Advice
Try iCal first. It’s
free, and you already have it on your computer. Though iCal’s weak spot
is task management, it’s otherwise a powerful tool and a very good
calendar program, especially for individ-uals. It works extremely well
with the rest of Apple’s personal-management applications, including
Mail and Address Book. And with its support for the CalDAV
calendar-networking specification, iCal is poised to become a player in
office networks as well.
I can’t recommend Sunbird over iCal, but if you use Mozilla’s
Thunderbird as your e-mail client, check out Lightning, an add-on that
gives you Sunbird’s features right inside Thunderbird. Now Up-to-Date
& Contact doesn’t do much more for individual users than the
offerings from Apple and Mozilla, and Now’s product is slated for
replacement; but Now Up-to-Date & Contact does support sharing in a
mixed-platform environment. Simply as a calendar, SOHO Organizer isn’t
dramatically better than iCal, but it is a terrific program if you’re
an irrepressible notetaker.
If you live on the Web, the calendar services from Yahoo and
Google let you get to your info from any computer with an Internet
connection. Yahoo’s calendar has a decent to-do list feature, while
Gmail and Google Calendar are as good a team as Mail and iCal. And if
you need something with real task-management power, What ToDo is my
recommendation for the individual user. If you seek a serious,
committed relationship with some powerful but demanding software, try
both Contactizer Pro and Daylite for a while before deciding which one
to go steady with.
