Good freeware calender with reminder?

[Frag_Maniac]

I'm looking for a decent freeware calender that you can set email, popup and sound reminders in. I tried Google Calender, but I don't like that it requires you to have it open for the popup and sound notifications to work.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Actually, the W8 calendar app does all that, including syncing with phone. Unfortunately, I don't think you'll find one doing all that in 7....I'm still searching myself.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Well after checking some reviews I decided to try Rainlendar2 Lite.

So far this seems to be a nice little app. The Lite (free) version doesn't have the Google Calendar, Outlook, or phone tie-ins, nor iCal or network shared calendar support, but I mostly just wanted a working desktop calendar with popup and alarm notification, and it's very good and quite adjustable for that. This also only uses a measly 12MB RAM.

Basically I wanted a calendar/alarm app, and that's what this is. I checked and it seems the W8 one you're referring to can't play sounds. In fact I found a site that shows you how to build an alarm/calendar app via fine tuning an alarm app.

The only slight downside I can see to Raincalendar is it's time of day setting for reminders/alarms is a bit tedious. You basically have to pick a day ahead and calculate via a drop down box how many minutes before midnight (since that's when the day you picked starts) for it to be activated. There's no quick TOD setting, thus it helps to have a calculator handy. That is only if you want to set it to a precise time in minutes though. Setting it to go off at a given hour is quite easy.

 

[rtwjunkie]

I shall check it out. Good find, Frag Maniac!

 

[newtekie1]

Doesn't Windows Live Mail do this?

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Doesn't Windows Live Mail do this?

Maybe it does, I don't know, but when you have Live Mail, they try to push you toward Outlook, which has a free version now, and I couldn't get that to work, at least not with an audible alarm. Since MS and Google compete so closely, and Google's calendar doesn't have an alarm , I figured MS' probably doesn't either.

Besides that, I've tried using the Live Mail calendar before, and one thing I didn't like about it is no recurrance feature, meaning you have to set individual reminders vs having one repeat as often as you designate, which Rainlendar has. You can also set it to use any wav file for your alarm.

It also has multiple skins to choose from. I kinda like the default one called Shadow though, it's a small calendar you can set in the corner of your desktop, which is comprised of just the fonts part of the calendar, and you can set it to any opacity you want.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Playing around with the W8 calendar app, i found out it does give an audible ding-ding type reminder along with a popup, even when on desktop. It sychronizes with W8 phone too, but no audible reminder there, only visual.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

Playing around with the W8 calendar app, i found out it does give an audible ding-ding type reminder along with a popup, even when on desktop. It sychronizes with W8 phone too, but no audible reminder there, only visual.

Nice, but I'm on W7, kinda weird that on the phone you only get the visual. I'd have thought it would be the other way around.

 

[rtwjunkie]

Yeah, youre right, it IS kind of weird to do it like that.

 

[Frag_Maniac]

BTW, never mind what I said about being hard to set exact time of reminder/alarm in Rainlendar. I found out it was set to "All day event" by default. Once you uncheck that box when creating a reminder, it opens up a complete list of times for fine tuning.