Flexible Views. See your information the way you want to: switch between weekly, monthly, two-monthly, yearly or multi-week views in the Calendar window. Here, events can be viewed and moved between different dates. The Reminders window shows a daily view with an at-a-glance schedule. You can also view and edit all your notes and events for the day here.

Media-Rich Reminders. A Reminder for one day can contain text in different fonts, colours and sizes. It can also contain small images, useful for building up a diary or hiliting key information. If you need a certain piece of information to become a more formal event which might repeat or have an alarm, it can still have its own font, colour and style to differentiate it.

iCal Import & Export. Save a calendar to a file in iCal, then import the file into PreMinder, or import any stnadard vCalendar file. You can also save an iCal or vCalendar file in PreMinder, ready to be imported into another application.

Import Birthdays. Always forgetting people's birthdays? Import birthdays stored in your Mac OS X address book directly into PreMinder, then set an alarm for them. PreMinder can even calculate people's ages for you, so you don't miss an important birthday.

Click and Type. Don't fiddle around with lots of controls when you need to create an event quickly. Just click on the day you want to add something to, and start typing in the large central field in the Reminders window. Times are automatically recognised as you type. To change some text to a more formal event, select it and click an add button; you can then make the event repeat or have an alarm.

Spans. Create multi-day banner events via simple drag and drop. They can be easiy resized by dragging the edges or moved around in the Calendar window.

Repeating Events. Define events that repeat over a period of time or indefinitely. Full controls are provided for custom repeating events. Make events that repeat on the last Monday of each month, or once a week, every three days... there are a full range of possibilities.

Powerful Alarms. Any event can have an alarm attached to it which can either display a message (Growl is supported) or launch an application or open a file, or send an email to one or more people. You can specify a sound to be played when the alarm triggers. You can set when an alarm is triggered precisely, and even set it to 'pester' you-- go off several times over a specfied period so you can't miss it!

Scrolling View. The new scrollbar lets you scroll through the months of the year, and show the end of one month and the start of another in your month view. Plus, it's live, so you can scan through a year's events quickly. The helpful month indicators in the scrollbar show you where you are and where to scroll to. It's shown on the right >>

Fast Time Travel. Jump to any point in time quickly with buttons that let you glide between months or years. Use the unique scrolling slider at the top of the Calendar to go to any month of the year, and push the slider to the edge to scroll into the next year. Get back to today by clicking on the Target button. Scrub through a year's Reminders using the slider in the Reminders Window.

To get started with PreMinder you may wish to import some information from iCal. Open iCal and select the calendar you want to export in the source list on the left hand side of the iCal window. Choose 'Export...' from the 'File' menu. Save the file on your desktop: it should have an extension that is '.ics'. Open PreMinder and choose 'Import Calendar' from the 'File' menu. Select the file you saved to the desktop and click 'OK'. A progress bar will appear in the large date in the palette on the left. Your data should appear in the calendar. Preminder can also import vCalendar files saved from other programs.

When you first open PreMinder you will see three main windows. The large calendar window lets you see information in different views such as 'monthly' or 'weekly'. Below it is the Reminders window, which provides a view of information for a single day, and which allows you to edit the information for that day. The window on the left is the Edit Events window, which has controls for adding things like repeating events. To add some information for a day, click on a day in the Calendar window. You can then start typing in the Reminders window. Click here for more about editing.

PreMinder can import calendar files saved from iCal, and export calendar files which can be imported into iCal. However, I am working on automatic synchronisation with iCal, which will be much less hassle. Events saved to your Mac's system calendar store can also be automatically synchronised with devices such as the iPhone or other calendar software, or services such as MobileMe. As I have limited time to work on PreMinder this feature will take some time to implement. When ready, this feature will require at least Mac OS 10.5.

PreMinder does not currently support languages with non-Roman alphabets or which use extended character sets. This is due to a legacy code support issue with the engine PreMinder is built with. I hope to be able to support all languages at some future point.