Entourage is unlikely to be the best loved application on an Apple Mail fanboy’s blog.
But it does have one feature I like, the “My Day” widget that presents the day’s appointments and tasks in nice little interface. As I’ve said before, reluctantly, it’s a good idea.
Today is an app that does the same thing. It brings the day’s events and jobs together in a handy little interface that is also functional.
It copes well with CalDAV as well as “normal” iCal calendars, soups them up out of iCal and displays them nicely.
Moving the mouse over the items pops up a tool tip containing its notes.
Along the bottom of the interface, buttons allow you to add appointments and tasks directly from the app itself, perform other actions or print out the day’s activities in a handy hard copy.
The app’s preferences are fully-featured, and offer options for menubar display of the app, a global keyboard shortcut and whether or not to display it on top of other windows.
You can also stipulate which calendars to display.
A further pane provides the opportunity to set global alert styles for your appointments. So, for example, you could choose to get a fifteen minute email reminder on all your appointments, rather than hacking through iCal’s interface each time to set it individually. This looks like the most attractive time-saving option of the app to me.
An update (1.8) has just been released that promises improved performance and seamless compatibility with Snow Leopard (as it currently stands).
Today is shareware (USD 15) and is available from the developer’s web site 
.
All the gain of Entourage without the pain!
Have you taken a look at Organized?
http://islayer.com/apps/organized/
It’s pretty good, too.
I want to make a general comment. I am happy you have revisited this blog. I check it every day. And, I think your information is very worthwhile.
Thanks for being back.
[...] for a serious but customizable reminder setup, adds a Gmail gadget to its arsenal of tools Today: Entourage’s “My Day” for everyone – hawkwings.net 06/30/2009 Entourage is unlikely to be the best loved application on an Apple [...]
Thank you very much for bringing the blog to life again! Now that I don’t need to use Exchange Server anymore and I started using Mail last week and this was the first place I pointed my browser to get the latest updates on how to pimp my email experience! I am testing both Today and Organized now!!
I’ve found the almost perfect free solution: I am using the “Organized” Dashboard widget as an OSX application, so I don’t need to access my Dashboard every time I want to check my day status. The only caveat is that “Organized” will show up in the top of all applications, like Entourage’s My Day and it’s not possible to minimize it. For me this is a minor caveat though.
For instructions on how to transform any widget into an application, read here: http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20050422172929402&query=dashboard%2Bdevmode
Another dashboard solution is the free iCal Events. As well, I dig the app Dasher which will activate the Dashboard at the interval you set – say after 5 minutes of inactivity. If it wasn’t for Dasher I’d rarely remember to check my widgets.
Not on topic, but must be time, Tim, for your to do a review of Postbox :-)
If time is limiting, just sleep (even) less.
Your readers are waiting. :-)
Steve
Gone again? ;-(
I guess it must look like it.
We are one week away from the end of semester, so blogging is about to take off again.
As it happens, I’m spending most of today catching up on back-end things—sorting through 421 comments, updating WordPress, updating the Plug-ins lists, etc—so that I can hit the ground running in a few days.