Product Reviews

At the opposite end of the information management software spectrum to DayLite is DayChaser. Despite the similar names, DayChaser is a much more limited application, eschewing all the standard PIM features. Its more limited feature set means it should have a much broader appeal than the very specialised Daylite - but all Mac users aready get an excellent, not to mention free, calendaring application in the form of iCal. So, why have this additional software?

We were asking ourselves this question after playing around in DayChaser for a few minutes, but there are a few subtle and potentially important differences. The first is that it treats multiple calendars as distinct, separate documents, which you can double-click in the Finder to open. This is more intuitive than iCal's method of displaying multiple calendars in the same window, with the ability to turn each one on or off in the display, although it can of course also limit functionality by preventing you from viewing multiple calendars simultaneously - to see if a work appointment clashes with a home one, for example.

The next is the ability to view a full year at a glance, as well as viewing all calendar entries in a list view, making it easy to sort and find particular appointments. These are genuinely useful features not found in most calendar applications.

DayChaser also allows you to 'schedule executable commands'. This means you can set your computer to perform a specific task, such as run an AppleScript, open an application or even copy files to

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another location, at a given time. There are countless examples of when this could be useful, such as having a particular file that needs to be copied to a shared server at a specific time every week. This isn't a feature found in Daylite, but as we showed in our Mac OS X Secrets feature last issue you can do this in iCal using Alarms.

Another useful feature is the ability to filter your calendar entries. In its most basic form, this allows you to view, for example, only your appointments while hiding your all-day events and to-do items. But you can also set up complex custom filters, allowing you to find items of the same category, or those with a certain word in their name, and so on.

The ability to categorise calendar entries is useful but you can achieve much the same thing using iCal's ability to display multiple calendars at once. A nice touch in DayChaser, though, is that you can associate an icon to a category, making events in that category stand out more.

Finally, there's the ability to turn calendar events into to-do list items. This is a godsend if, like us, you tend to find that the first item on every to-do list should say 'remember to check your to-do list'. By effectively combining the functionality of a calendar and a to-do list, DayChaser makes both tools more useful.

Despite these benefits, the fact that DayChaser is not integrated into the operating system or .Mac means it has numerous limitations when compared to iCal. If you want to share your calendar with others, such as over the web, you have to export it to iCal first. DayChaser's idea of multi-user support is to send another user a copy of your data file. And to import holidays or other calendar data, you have to import them from guess where? iCal.

Some of DayChaser's features, such as filtering and executable tasks, may appeal if you have specific requirements. But for general use, it's hard to find any compelling reasons to opt for this over either the free offering from Apple, or the calendar functionality built into the information management software that more demanding users will already be using.