This shows the dates as monthly calendars from 1990 to 2020. You can move forward one month by clicking the dog-eared page at bottom right (or go back a month by Option-clicking it).
The currently selected date will be hilited. A scheduler for the selected date will appear at right. You can type in important meetings and reminders here.
You can make more substantial date shifts by clicking on the Month or Year titles at the top (these are popup menus).
The current date and time appear below the currently displayed month and year headings. To return to the current date's month, just click on today's date.
Click the small alarm clock icon at top right to open and update the Alarm Clock window. Clicking the dates will update the currently displayed date on the Alarm Clock window. This is a convenient way of setting a date for an alarm.
Scheduling Field
The downward pointing arrow to the top right of the Calendar is a pop up menu allowing you to Show (or Hide) the Scheduling field, which will appear to the right of the Calendar window. It is also text editor and allows you to record important dates and events for any day. Simply select the day of interest by clicking in the calendar, then type your important events. You can resize the window by dragging on the grow box at bottom right, or clicking the zoom window at top right. When you click on another day in the calendar, your schedule will be saved to disc (also when you quit). You can add an alarm to the Alarm Clock from the Schedule window by selecting it in the schedule field, then clicking the small icon of the alarm clock on the top left of the calendar. You will be shown the Alarm Clock window with the text already entered in the "Text to Display" field and the correct time set if you put one at the beginning of your entry (see below). Just click any further options you need (pre-alarm time warning, repetition interval etc) and click the Set button. I have tried to include most common formats you can use for the time, but you should note the following points if you want to have these put in automatically correctly:
•the time of day must be the first entry of the line
•the time should be separated from the text by one of: ":", " ", ","
•periods & colons can separate hours & minutes (ie 935 = 9.35 = 9:35)
•afternoon hours must have some indication that they are after 1200pm. The possible options are to add "pm" or "PM" or "p" or "P" or use 24 hour clock notation ie hrs or HRS, otherwise they will be interpreted as being in the wee hours of the morning!
•you do not have to put a time in the line, but then the present time will show in the Alarm Clock window.
•Do not leave a space after a digit, ie 3pm and 3 pm are not the same time; the latter will be read as 3am.
The pop up Calendar menu has other options also. You can display the help window with the Calendar item showing by selecting the Show Help... item.
The next menu item is a way of storing recurring templates for each day of the week (so you dont have to type them in repeatedly). If you have a recurring schedule each week (eg of meetings etc), you can create a prototypic day, then click this button to store the current day's schedules as a template for that day of every week (old & new). Note that this will only affect previously empty days. If you subsequently add to a template schedule the full day's events will be saved as a specific schedule for that day. Other options allow you to delete all prior schedules up to but not including the selected day, or just delete the selected day or the current day's template. You can also achieve the same results by selecting all of the text, then pressing the Delete key (for schedules) or selecting the Create Daily Template option in the pop up menu. To erase all your current schedules, find the DeskMates "Schedule.prefs" file (in the system folder under system 6, and in the Preferences folder under system 7) and drag it to the trash. Note that this will erase every single schedule setting (forever!). Note that automatic day templates do not take up any extra disc space if you do not add anything to them.
Schedules are stored as resources in the "Schedule.prefs" file in the system folder (or Preferences folder), and should take up a minimum of disc space (certainly less than comparable text files). Although it would seem inappropriate, note that these schedules can theoretically be more than 32K in size if you give DeskMates sufficient RAM allocation). You can open text into the Schedules in the same way you would open them into the NoteBook. Hence the Open..., Save As..., Page Setup..., and Print items work the same as for the NoteBook. There is an exception worth noting: if you use a menu extender of some sort which adds hierarchical menus to the Open... menu item be aware that these usually use the routines which open files from the Finder, and hence a file will be opened into the NoteBook, not the Schedule field. Note that the Search For... item will present a simpler search dialog box to search through different days, but you can do more complex searches using the usual text search methods within any one schedule by clicking the appropriate option in the presented Find... dialog box.
