Wednesday, October 10, 2007

Windows reminder app

Does anyone know of a good Windows-based calendar / reminder application? I'm currently using the Lightning plug-in for Thunderbird. Lightning is basically a plug-in version of Sunbird, which is a Mozilla calendar application. It has the advantage of being able to read events from my Google calendar plus add events of its own, and it can give you reminders, but the reminders seem to be flaky.

My company uses Lotus Notes for email, but after using it for a few years, I now flatly refuse to install it. I switched to Outlook for the next few years, and Outlook has a pretty nice calendar built-in. I'd set up reminders for my meetings, and a message box would pop up 10 minutes beforehand. I switched to Thunderbird for email a year or so ago, but Thunderbird doesn't have a calendar built-in, so I've been without one ever since. I discovered Sunbird a little while ago and set that up, but soon discovered Lightning — it's the same thing as Sunbird but since it's a Thunderbird plug-in, it's one less application to run. However, I have been late for a number of meetings lately because my reminders never fired. Sometimes they fire the next time I stop and start Thunderbird, and sometimes they simply fire an hour or two later. The reminder for the meeting I was late for this morning fired an hour after the meeting ended.

I'm thinking of re-installing Outlook just for the calendar, but that seems like overkill. Considering how happy I've been with Firefox and Thunderbird (for the most part), I'm quite disappointed with Sunbird. Anyone have any other suggestions?

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've a similar problem here - find Thunderbird a very useful solution in that it handles all my mail accounts and google calendar (via lightning), but reminders usually pop up two weeks after the event, making them a bit useless