For many years — nine to be exact — I have used Sidekick 98 a calendaring / to-do-list program that I am very fond of. I particularly like the way it allows me to define multi-day projects (e.g. trips out of town) with a bright text bar that extends across the dates and makes a month at a glance easy.
Like other rabid Sidekick 98 fans, I accept no substitutes: Sidekick 99 was a lousy, stripped-down nonfunctional mistake. Sidekick 2000 or whatever they called it wasn't even worth thinking about. And then Starfish Software cratered. Someone got them to do a Y2K patch, which was necessary, and I thought I was good for long while.
I sure didn't expect that there would be a Year 2006 bug. Yes, even with the Y2K patch, Sidekick 98 gets very unhappy about dates in 2006 and 2007.
So it may be that the time has come to find myself a nice iCal compliant calendar with good privacy features (desiderata that leave out the two biggest contenders, Outlook and Google Calendar).
Hard to make the move, but getting harder not to. And hard too to pick what to move to. Whatever I pick has to be something I can have resident on both office and home desktops, with data transferred via a USB drive (can't be solely via the net since I want it on my laptop too, and that's not always in use where there is internet access).
Nothing seems to offer the great color-coded monthly views I've gotten to depend on. But the two leading contenders are scrappy Rainlendar and sleek Essential PIM. (I don't think I like the look of Time & Chaos, which is more contact manager than scheduler, so that's a third, outside, choice.)
Advice anyone?
