It's a good thing the White Rabbit never owned OnTime for Windows, because if he had, the tardy little rodent might have kept his appointment but missed Alice, and we all would be the poorer for it. You have an opportunity that Lewis Carroll did not with this small calendar program for Windows.
OnTime is a basic calendar/appointment program. It wasn't designed to have every function under the sun, but what it does do, it does with relative grace and simplicity. Once installed, it only takes up 1.4 MB on the hard drive (although it requires 2.2 MB for installation), and so it is perfect for those notebook computers where disk space is precious. It even provides import and export support for palmtop computers.
OnTime's main function is to schedule events or appointments. The Day Planner looks like any normal appointments calendar transferred to a computer screen. You click on a time slot and enter appointment information. You are not limited to a day by day view; OnTime can display appointments by the week or the month. Moreover, you can categorize your appointments by type, so that you could easily display, for instance, all your scheduled appointments with the I.R.S.
OnTime can be very handy, but sometimes it is a little cumbersome to use. For instance, to add an appointment you must (in the dialog box that pops up) write the appointment message, categorize the appointment, establish its frequency, type in the date and the time and the length, and decide if you want the program to set an alarm to warn you about the appointment (handy for the above-mentioned I.R.S.). The appointment message can only contain 80 characters; for longer memos you must attach an OnTime Note, which is a separate text field.
One of the nifty things about OnTime is its ability to print calendars or planners. If you have a laser printer, for instance, you can make a trifolded calendar printed on both sides that shows your appointments or other events. This is handy not just for personal appointments, but for businesses to create flyers to publicize upcoming events, speakers, or seminars. OnTime also provides support for WinBeep, the pager software from Fourth Wave Technologies. If you have WinBeep, you can use OnTime to send alarms for your appointments to your pager.
One feature OnTime does not have is a diary feature. Although you can use OnTime Notes for certain purposes, they are not very useful for diary entries. Moreover, OnTime does not provide a password feature, and so none of the data is secure. These two features, easily added, would have raised the value of the program considerably.
OnTime is a useful program, though it has little color to it. It schedules events and appointments, and informs you of them, doing so with relative facility. It does not have all the bells and whistles of some of the larger Personal Information Manager programs, but serves a solid purpose. Time heals all wounds, and OnTime heals late appointments.
Reviewed July 1994 by Mark Pitcavage for Nautilus CD.
