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I can't recall the last time I've used such a handy little program.
 technofile
Al Fasoldt's reviews and commentaries, continuously available online since 1983

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Menu Calendar: Free mini-calendar that works with Apple's iCal


April 7, 2004


By Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, Al Fasoldt
Copyright © 2004, The Post-Standard

   Apple's iCal calendar program, standard on all new Macs, has changed the way I keep track of my busy life. But for many months I've wished I had a choice between iCal and a no-frills calendar. When all I want is a quick look at what the date will be a few weeks from now, I don't need a heavy-duty application.
   My wish came true last week. I found Menu Calendar, a tiny program that pops open a small calendar any time I click a date icon in the OS X menu bar. Best of all, once that little calendar is open, a single click on any date opens iCal itself. And when iCal opens, it highlights the date I had clicked on, as if I had done the same thing in iCal.
   I can't recall the last time I've used such a handy little program. If I had a rating system for OS X utilities, ranked from 1 to 5, I'd give this gem a 6.
   Menu Calendar is a great little calendar on its own, easy to open because the launch icon is right next to my clock at the upper right corner of the screen. And it continually shows a "live" date display in the menu bar -- a handy bonus, considering Apple's lapse in designing the clock to show either the time or the date but not both at once. (This can be changed with some hacks and a few utilities, but by default the clock won't show the date while it shows the time.)
   Menu Calendar is available free from Objectpark Software of Bonn, Germany. You can download MenuCalendar from www.objectpark.net. As soon as you run the program, it installs itself in the OS X menu bar and remains there even after you reboot. There's nothing else you have to do.
   In operation, Menu Calendar is easy to figure out. Take note of the "i" icon at the bottom of the little calendar; it's the launcher for Menu Calendar's preferences.
   In addition to a helpful setting that can change the start of the week to Monday (as is common in Europe) or to Sunday (the North American standard), Menu Calendar's preferences also include a setting for automatically closing the calendar (or "hiding" it, in the quaint terminology of OS X) after specified number of seconds. I set mine to 7 seconds, but you can go as high as 999 seconds, or about 16 minutes.
   Menu Calendar does even more. If iCal is already open, clicking on a date in Menu Calendar's tiny calendar switches iCal's own focus to that day, without bringing iCal's windows to the foreground. Clicking a forward or backward arrow in Menu Calendar rolls the calendar ahead or behind by one month without changing the iCal display, but iCal catches up as soon as you click a date in the new month display.
   My conversations with Mac users convince me that many of you have never tried iCal. If that's your situation, you have an opportunity to give iCal a try if you install Menu Calendar. You might be surprised at how seductive such a combination of programs can be.