Adobe InDesign
Calendars are a pain in the behind to build—especially ones that are easily editable. Building a calendar in Adobe InDesign gives you maximum flexibility for editing and use. But getting to that point is the difficult part.
Read more “Building calendars the easy way with this script for Adobe InDesign”
Apple | Mac
Itsycal is a tiny calendar for your Mac’s menu bar. It adds one function that has been missing on the Mac from day one, and one that has driven me crazy for years.
Itsycal will display a monthly calendar, as well as your calendar events from the Mac Calendar app. Events are highlighted on the calendar, and you can also create and delete (but not edit) events.
Itsycal is a lightweight app and is free of charge.
Apple | Mac
A few years back I had an app that would show a simple calendar icon in the menubar which when clicked would drop down a simple calendar of the current month. It did nothing else, but it was useful to me to be able to see a full month calendar. But it stopped working long ago. I gave up looking for a simple replacement.
A few days ago I came across Pop-Calendar from Magnesium-App. Pop-Calendar is a free utility that placed the date in a calendar icon in your menubar. When you click the icon, you can view the entire year at once or single month view (click the screenshot above for a larger view) by clicking on the month name. Pop-Calendar will remember which you view you used last, but you can switch at any time.
Pop-Calendar uses Apple’s built-in Calendar app to display all your events in either view. When you click on an individual day, you can see the day’s events. You can also add new calendar events simply by clicking a small + icon at the top of the pop-up window that appears when clicking on a day.
Pop-Calendar offers the ability to set a keyboard shortcut to show the window, as well as the ability to turn on and off individual calendars from Apple’s Calendar app. That’s all there is to it, and that’s why I love it!
Beside being free, simple to use, and easy on the eyes, it already works in Mac OS X Yosemite—though I do hope the developer adds transparency once Yosemite ships in the fall. Pop-Calendar is available directly from the developer’s site, or in the Mac App Store.
Apple | Mac
When I want to add a simple reminder to my calendar, I have to launch iCal, find the date (if I’m lucky it’s in the same week I happen to be displaying), click to add an event, double the event name to edit it, click yet again to make time adjustments, then place a bandage on my bleeding head from banging it on my desk. It shouldn’t be that difficult.
Thankfully, Remind Me Later (Free) relieves me of the keystrokes and the bleeding head.
Remind Me Later lives in the menubar, and allows me to add calendar events using simple plain language in a single dialog box which I can activate with a keyboard shortcut, or clicking the icon in the menubar. It’s even smart enough to understand that fri 530pm means “this Friday” at “5:30 pm.” I just love how simple the interface is, and am amazed at how such a single feature app can make my day easier.
Once you download the app from the website or the Apple Mac Store, you make a few configurations in the preferences and you’re off and running. If you use iCal, and add frequent new events, Remind Me Later is virtually the perfect add-on.
Apple | Mac
Two apps that got my attention greatly improve the built-in calendar app are Week Cal from Utilitap, and Calvetica from Mysterious Trousers. Both integrate with iCal and the iPhone’s built-in calendar, as well as sync with Google Calendar for those that prefer to go that route.
Week Cal brings a decidedly iCal-like interface to your iPhone and boasts numerous features. Perhaps one of the top features is the ability to rotate the screen for a landscape view of your calendar, and great list, day, week and month views. Week Cal costs $1.99
Calvetica goes in the opposite direction, opting to offer a simple interface that requires as few taps as possible to view and set calendar items. Calvetica is fast, syncs with iCal, and offers snoozable event alarms. There is a free version that allows you to try the basic functionality, and the pro version costs only $2.99.
I’ve been using the free version of Calvetica for a few days and really like it, but both apps appear to be quite impressive. If you’re looking for something a little different to keep track of your day, I think you may find at least one of them to be to your liking.
Apple | Mac
Over the years I’ve installed a lot of commercial software, shareware and freeware on my Macs. I love trying new apps. That being said, most of what I install gets used once or twice, then discarded. Last week I published 10 of my favorite apps in Part 1, and another 10 in Part 2. Today I conclude the series with 10 more apps that I love to use.The applications listed below contains a few “old timers” and several Johnny-Come-Lately apps that have found a permanent home on my Mac.
Snapz Pro XThe last few years has seen several fancy-pants screen capture utilities come to market. They all look spectacular, but I’ve stayed with Snapz Pro X because it offers the perfect balance of features at a reasonable price. Snapz Pro X offers everything you would expect in a screen capture utility, with the added ability to capture video and audio of your Mac’s screen (a feature I love to use when a web site attempts to prevent downloading of audio or video!). When it comes to static image capture of your screen, Snapz Pro can capture your entire screen, specific windows, or user definable portions of your screen with a keyboard shortcut, and save it in a number of formats. It also gives you the ability to keep the cursor visible, keep or remove drop shadows, add watermarks, and much more. Snapz Pro X with video capture capability costs you $69 and is well worth it if you do a lot of screen captures.
Read more “30 Mac OS X apps and utilities I love: Part 3”
Adobe InDesign
I was extremely happy to find out that one of the few scripts I used extensively in Adobe InDesign CS4 still works perfectly in the latest InDesign CS5 upgrade – making calendar creation dead simple.
Calendar Wizard, by Scott Selberg, makes creating editable calendars as simple as a few clicks of the mouse, a task that would make you nauseous if you had to do it manually in InDesign.
The script allows you to set numerous preferences before creating your calendar, such as what day of the week to start on, the ability to highlight holidays, and creating mini-calendars for the previous and next month in the corners. I don’t use scripts often, but this one is definitely worth keeping around.