Yesterday in the forum Pieter posted information on a sweet calendar application called MonoCalendar. It is completely free, and its primary reason for existing is to offer a Windows alternative to Apple’s popular iCal calendar app. I have to admit that it is definitely on its way!
There are a few things that I want to point out before diving into some of the good and bad things. First, there is a no-install version available, and it’s labeled as “Binary files” on the download page. That way you can try it out without having to install it.
The second thing is that the performance of this thing is absolutely incredible! After extraction the entire program consumes under 500KB of hard drive space, and it hovers around a mere 9 or 10MB of memory when being used. I don’t know about you, but I’d say that’s pretty darn good.
Is MonoCalendar ready for primetime? The only thing that it’s missing which I absolutely have to have is support for recurring events. Without that there is really no way that I can use it on a regular basis, and hopefully that will be coming in the next version. 
Here is a list of the good and bad things that I’ve found thus far in MonoCalendar:
–The Good News–
- Drag & drop support for events
- Zoom in and out of the calendar (this is actually pretty cool, and surprisingly one of my favorite things)
- Cool mini calendar in the sidebar that can be resized to show more months
- 20 different languages available
- Import/export calendars
–The Bad News–
- Can’t add recurring events
- Can’t subscribe to web-based calendars
- No copy and paste
- No right-click menu (seems natural to have options like Delete in a right-click menu)
- No advanced properties for events (eg. description, location)
- Can’t customize calendar colors
- It can be hard to see overlapping events
- I think Apple’s iCal also supports a todo list, and that would be pretty cool in this program
MonoCalendar Homepage
Thanks for the tip Pieter!
Pretty cool, but I use Sunbird ([mozilla.org]) and that works very well. I am going to have to give this one a shot.
Right now I think switching over from Sunbird would be hard. Sunbird has a lot more features than this does, but it’s on its way.
Right now it’s too basic.
Sunbird Absolutely Rocks. So does EssentialPIM Free. This application has a long way to go.
Yeah, it definitely is, but it’s on the right track.
I haven’t tried the EssentialPIM before, in fact I hadn’t even heard of it. When checking out the screenshots I had to do a double take though because of the striking similarities to Outlook. The free version looks like it is pretty restrictive over what you can and can’t do, but I think I’ll be trying it out.