The iCal challenge

at 12:30, but suggesting next Monday as an alternative, at 9:30 at the Starbucks in Casa Linda Plaza. Mail's data detectors recognized meeting tomorrow if I held the cursor over that pair of words, but didn't pick up the time later in the sentence. Gmail, on the other hand, without prompting, suggested creating an event. The event I created with a single click missed meeting tomorrow and went instead for next Monday, but did effortlessly pick up the time and the location. (Yahoo Mail has no similar feature.) Google Calendar also can send an SMS (text) message to my cell phone to notify me of upcoming events.

Getting Things Done

With the exception of Google's calendar, all of the programs mentioned so far have a limited to-do--list or task-list feature. You can enter a task, assign it to a calendar, give it a priority level, and check it off when it's done, but that's about it. If you have more-complicated obligations to manage, you need a more flexible tool.

What ToDo is a nifty project and task organizer that's designed along the lines of best-selling author David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) books. What ToDo tracks tasks, projects, and contexts--broad classifications under which you can group tasks, such as e-mails to send or phone calls to make.

What ToDo also allows you to group tasks (items) within projects, organize them, give them priorities and due dates, and add notes. What ToDo isn't specifically a calendar application, although it shows a mini-calendar in its Detail drawer that you can use to assign deadline dates. It isn't iCal-aware, and a task with a deadline won't automatically appear in your iCal calendar. For individual users, the program's simplicity may well be a plus. And aside from the lack of integration with iCal, it has a very nice Mac OS X user interface. One particular weakness of What ToDo is printing--What ToDo has no special report layouts. Individual users may find that What ToDo works very well as a complement to iCal.

Organize Everything

Now Upto-Date & Contact offers excellent cross-platform, multiuser calendaring and contact management. If you need more power in both the calendar and task-management areas than you can get from, say, iCal and What ToDo, don't despair. A couple of tools can help you get comprehensively organized. But be warned: you might need help with the tools themselves.

The programs in the do-it-all category, Objective Decision's Contactizer Pro and Marketcircle's Daylite, are Mac-only. Contactizer Pro's interface has a brushed-metal effect with a sleek, modernistic feel; by comparison, the large, colorful icons in Daylite seem old-fashioned. Looks aside, both programs are loaded with features. Both manage calendars; track e-mail, projects, and associated tasks; sync data with a variety of programs like iCal, Apple Mail, and more; cooperate with programs like iChat and Skype; print reports in a variety of formats; and much more. Contactizer Pro's design seems more conventional: it tracks contacts (people), projects, tasks, and communications, and the links between these entities seem natural.

Contactizer Pro is the easier of the two to learn without consulting the manual--which is lucky for users, since there is no manual. Contactizer Pro takes a peer-to-peer approach to sharing data between users: there's no server, something that Objective Decision touts as an advantage. Technically, it may be an advantage for a three-person shop. But for larger workgroups, Daylite's client-server approach is probably more efficient.

Daylite's approach to linking data is more free-form and takes some getting used to, and it definitely has some quirks. If you create a new task while you're looking at the Notes screen, when you then click on OK and save your task, you won't see it automatically. You have to switch to the Tasks view and select the My Tasks item in the Tasks index pane. This may be disconcerting for novices.

Daylite's calendaring module seems weaker than