MenuCalendarClock: Slick new to-do management features for Leopard
MenuCalendarClock is a menubar app for iCal that gives you quick access to your iCal events and to-dos. Another menubar app, High Priority, had the jump on it in Tiger, as High Priority offered the ability to create new to-dos and mark tasks as completed.
Now, the new Leopard-friendly MenuCalendarClock 3.0 offers the same interaction with to-dos. There are no plans to rewrite High Priority 
for Leopard, so MenuCalendarClock is worth another look.
It adds a menubar item with the date and/or the time, replacing the default System date/time display. Clicking on it opens a drop-down box with the current month, and a list of events and tasks for the day which can be toggled on and off.
Hovering over the calendar displays a tooltip containing that day’s events.
The Action wheel opens a menu with options to reveal a search field, copy today’s date into the clipboard, display the app’s preferences and more.
MenuCalendarClock is also very well provided with keyboard shortcut. By default Control-Option-Command-C pops down the display, although the combination can be set by the user in the preferences.
A further option in the preferences enables a tooltip display of the days events and to-dos when the mouse is hovered over the menubar item.
The Preference Pane controls options for general display, customising the font and colour of the time display and the choice of a number of icons.
Further options allow you to set which iCal calendars it should display and options for dealing with the birthdays of your Address Book contacts.
New in the latest version is the ability to create tasks and to edit and mark them as complete. Needless to say this passes through seamlessly into iCal and Leopard Mail’s new to-do lists.
A keyboard shortcut pops up a “heads up display” for creating a new task. I find it easier to use that the list of to-dos in Mail (subject for another post, but why are Mail’s to-do features so underdone?!).
Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like one can tab through the fields in the display, which is a pain. Also I find that I can associate a to-do with any of my iCal calendars in MenuCalendarClock, something I can’t do in Mail.app. The to-do icons are colour-coded to the particular iCal calendar. The option to colour the text of the to-do as well would be nice.
Highlighting a task, pressing Command-I to bring up the Inspector allows existing to-dos to be edited, Shift-Command-C marks it as complete. It’s fast and it’s easy to master.
MenuCalendarClock costs USD 19.95 to register. You will need to buy a licence to access the to-do management features, although some basic features can be used when it is unregistered. Also, it does the job in English, German, Finnish, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Norwegian, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.
Get it from the developer’s web site .
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- High Priority: Menubar iCal ToDo management
- DoBeDo iCal widget 2.5: Resizable, Groups, more
Tags: calendar, events, iCal, Leopard, mail.app, menubar, Productivity, task management, to dos
November 8th, 2007 at 3:16 am
fair app and all but frankly these guys can go to hell for all i care, a paid upgrade just to support leopard?! i think not, i’d rather go without
November 8th, 2007 at 3:28 am
I used this app on Tiger. It is an OK app, but they now want a full price paid update just to work on Leopard! I did not buy it again and will skip it. Not that important. Also since iCal finally shows the correct date in the dock, I will not miss it that much.
November 8th, 2007 at 5:52 am
Magical is actually better in my opinion. it’s the birst link returned from google after searching for “Magical”. (From Charcoal software)
November 8th, 2007 at 6:12 am
Just curious Tim — you said, “why are Mail’s to-do features so underdone?!)”
I want to know for a MailTags developer’s perspective — what is underdone? — ie as I look at putting to do’s back into MT for Leopard, what do I have to do to make it better than what Apple is doing?
November 8th, 2007 at 6:44 am
MrArfArf — Looks nice, but it can’t help me manage my to-dos, can it? Or am I missing something?
November 9th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
The app sounds perfect for my needs, but after paying $20 and downloading the 3.0.2 version for Leopard, I can’t get the program to even open. It won’t give me the option to register my key, but only sends me back to the Buy Online page. Apparently I’m not the only person with this problem, but replies to the publisher go unanswered …
November 9th, 2007 at 1:41 pm
Tzero, I am sorry to hear of your problems. Esp. to hear that you are getting no response from the developer. It works fine for me.
November 9th, 2007 at 2:15 pm
Tim, did you upgrade to 3.0.2 over a previous version? Just trying to sort out why I might be having this difficulty. I tried downloading 2.7.5 then upgrading, but got a message that 2.7.5 won’t work on Leopard. Found a 3.0.0 version and tried that but got the original result — it won’t run or let me register …
November 9th, 2007 at 2:32 pm
I deleted by Tiger version, which was transferred over as part of the Leopard install, and then installed 3.0.1 from scratch, later upgrading that 3.0.1 install to 3.0.2
November 13th, 2007 at 7:14 am
Same problem as tzero.
I installed 3.0.2 on Mac OS X Leopard, then nothing !!
Looking for a solution…
November 13th, 2007 at 7:42 am
Pascal, I finally got it to work by trashing the 3.0.2 version, the downloading and installing version 3.0.0, which I found on Version Tracker (http://www.versiontracker.com/dyn/moreinfo/macosx/11903). That worked, for whatever reason; then I downloaded and installed the 3.0.1 version from the publisher’s site, that also worked. FWIW, I actually called the publisher last week (in Germany) about the problem and they said yes yes, we know, we’re working on it….
November 14th, 2007 at 1:27 am
P.S. As of this morning, Objectpark Software had removed the 3.0.2 version and replaced it with 3.0.4, which appears to solve this issue and others …
November 14th, 2007 at 6:25 am
@Tzero, thanks for taking the trouble to post your fix and the news of the new version. Much appreciated by Pascal (and others), I’m sure!
November 14th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I confirm.
Thank you very much, tzero.