The best calendar app for iPhone
Rejoice! I’ve finally found the best calendar app for the iPhone. It’s called Week Calendar, and it is such a relief and a joy to use it on a daily basis.
If you’re anything like me, you have been continually frustrated by Apple’s built-in calendar on the iPhone. For example, why does Apple only let you see 2 appointments at a time on the month view? Why does Apple make the day view completely unusable by forcing you to scroll through large chunks of color blocks? Why does the list view completely skip over days that don’t have appointments on them, so you totally get thrown off as to which day/week/year you’re looking at? Why is the week view completely unusable and only in landscape mode? Why does Apple do just about everything wrong when it comes to calendaring? (On the Mac, also, Apple has no idea how to make a decent calendar… that’s why we have 100% of our clients using BusyCal, the best calendar app for Mac.)
Apple may make great hardware, but I really think that their software engineers have been asleep at the wheel for the last 2 or 3 years. I have very little positive things to say about Apple’s software these days. Take a look at the disastrous Lion operating system to see what I’m talking about.
Lucky for all of us, Week Calendar has come to the rescue! Week Calendar is almost infinitely customizable, with hundreds upon hundreds of settings. You can truly make this calendar app work exactly the way that YOU want your calendar app to work.
And the technical support team is PHENOMENAL. Send them a question, and they’ll get back to you with the answer almost instantaneously. Send them a feature request, and your request might make its way into the very next update!
It’s just such a joy to deal with both the app and the development team behind the app! I haven’t been this excited about an app in a really long time.
Take a look at some of these amazing screenshots to see just A FEW of the hundreds of ways that you can work with Week Cal. This is by no means exhaustive… this is just a tiny handful of screenshots:
Look at this amazing week-at-a-glance view (known as the “Agenda View” in Week Calendar):
I love this view. It gives you a completely uncluttered glance at each week.
You can scroll through all the appointments on each day, you can tap on an appointment to view it or edit it or share it via email or cut/paste/move it to another time/date. And much more, too… you can even customize your menu choices in Week Calendar.
But it gets better:
If you double-tap on a day, you get taken to this beautiful Day View:
Now THAT’S what I’m talking about! A day-by-day view that ACTUALLY LETS YOU SEE a bunch of your appointments simultaneously, without having to scroll up and down!
And you can even hide those hourly headers (“9:00 AM”, “12:00 PM”, etc.) to show EVEN MORE appointments at-a-glance. Just beautiful.
The monthly calendar rightly takes up just a small section of your screen in the upper right-hand corner, instead of taking over your entire screen like Apple’s calendar app does incorrectly.
So let’s say that you actually like using a monthly view. Week Calendar gives you 2 beautiful month options to choose from, both of which are superior to Apple’s monthly views. The first one is called mini-month view:
WOW! Now why didn’t Apple think of this?! You actually get to see your entire month ALONG WITH THE APPOINTMENTS FOR EACH DAY! This makes it sooo easy to look ahead at your month and see exactly what you’ve got going on.
But if you’re a stickler for tradition and you really want to do it the “Apple way”, Week Calendar has even improved upon Apple’s traditional month view too:
Ta-da!! You get little colored dots on each day, letting you see how many appointments you have on each day for each calendar.
And down below, you have room to see many more appointments then what Apple shows you on their terrible month view. Again, in any of these views, you can double-tap on the date and you’ll be “zoomed into” the day view for that date. And there are a lot of other nice touches, too, such as icons to indicate repeating events and alarms.
Here’s a trick question:
Can you tell what’s unique about this screenshot?
This is called “rolling week” view, similar to the “scrolling week” view of BusyCal. This view always keeps your current week up at the top of your screen, and it scrolls one week at a time instead of one month at a time. This is brilliant for people who always need the current week front-and-center.
There are many other more views, too, such as an amazing week view… I’m just scratching the surface here.
And there are so many other features in Week Calendar as well… you can add custom icons and custom colors to events, you can link events to contacts in your address book, and so much more. There are literally hundreds of ways to customize and use this app.
Here is just one example of the built-in genius of Week Calendar’s customization capabilities:
Notice anything special about this screenshot?
You are able to set the time scroll wheel to show you only 15-minute increments (or any other increment that you desire)!
Halleljuah!! My appointments only take place on the quarter-hour, so why in the world does Apple force me to scroll through 20 selections (every 5 minutes) just to get through an entire hour? With Week Calendar, I can just show the 4 selections that I need!
Oh, here’s another gigantic time-saver… have you ever wanted to jump ahead to a date that was several months in the future, or jump back to a date that was several months in the past? Apple’s built-in calendar makes this a completely daunting task, because Apple forces you to manually tap through one month at a time. Not so with Week Calendar! Week Calendar lets you quickly & easily jump to whatever date you want to jump to! Here’s a screenshot of Week Calendar’s “Go To Date” screen:
I could go on and on about Week Calendar, but I’ll stop there for now. 
I give Week Calendar my highest recommendation, and I urge all of you to try it today!
I hope you enjoyed this article. If so, please donate a small amount so that I can continue to post blog articles in the future.
Who is ScottWorld? ScottWorld provides the best FileMaker consultants in Austin & Los Angeles.
Silence your iPhone at night, but still let certain people ring through. (Similar to Blackberry exceptions.)
A friend of mine is finally leaving the Blackberry for her very first iPhone, but she was concerned about missing the one feature that she loved on her Blacbkerry: the ability to create EXCEPTIONS.
What this means is that she can SILENCE her ringer when she goes to sleep at night, but she can set an EXCEPTION for her important family members so that they will ALWAYS ring through no matter what (in case of an emergency).
The way to easily imitate this functionality on the iPhone is very easy, and is outlined by Richard K. Miller on his blog here.
This is the simple process, in a nutshell:
1. Simply download a silent ringtone and set that as your default ringtone before you go to sleep at night.
2. But for any family members that you want to ring through, go into their contact card and set them to have their own audible ringtones. (This is a one-time setting for your family members; you don’t have to change this setting on a daily basis.)
3. Then, when you wake up in the morning, change your default ringtone back to an audible ringtone again.
I hope you enjoyed this article. If so, please donate a small amount so that I can continue to post blog articles in the future.
Who is ScottWorld? ScottWorld provides the best FileMaker consultants in Austin & Los Angeles.
R.I.P. R.I.M.
For people in the tech industry, this is HIGH HIGH COMEDY. It doesn’t get much funnier than this. This is the textbook definition of DELUSION.
The world misses Steve Jobs terribly
Wow. Is Phil Schiller at a funeral or an Apple Event?
The world misses Steve Jobs terribly.
Apple should hire me to speak for them again, like I did from 2000 to 2006.
In this time of strife & conflict amongst Americans, it is wonderful that there is one thing that we can all unanimously agree on: that AT&T sucks.
Now look, I’m not saying that Verizon is any better (they’re far worse, actually), but I think that AT&T is the company that sets the bar for being SUCKABLE to which all corporate conglomerates strive to achieve.
After spending 2 hours on hold or being transferred amongst various AT&T representatives in India who didn’t understand a thing about what I was trying to do, and after scouring the useless users manual for any hint of a solution, and after searching multiple online forums for people frantically searching for the same answers as me… I finally had to just roll up my sleeves, dig in, and figure it out for myself (with the help of my great clients at Aware Awake Alive).
All I wanted to do was something very simple for my clients:
Put a router (the 2Wire 3800HGV-B router, commonly used for AT&T U-Verse installations) into bridge mode, so that an Apple Time Capsule (or an Airport Extreme) could control the NAT on the network instead of the 2-Wire router controlling the network.
Super-simple, right?
Not according to the 3 Indian representatives and 1 American representative I spoke to at AT&T. They all told me that this wasn’t a configuration that they supported… that you can’t use any other routers on your network except their own. Well, of course, they’re morons because of COURSE it can be done.
And actually, it is very simple, once you know where to look.
To put your 2Wire 3800HGV-B router into bridge mode, all you have to do is this:
1. Use your computer to get on the same network as your 2Wire router, either wireless or hardwired in with an Ethernet cable.
2. Go to your web browser and type in 192.168.1.254, which will take you to the 2Router administration page.
3. Log in with the password printed on the side of your router.
4. Go to Settings>System Info>Event Notifications, and check the box called “Router-Behind-Router Detection” then click “Save”.
5. Restart your 2Wire router (one of the screens gives you a restart button… sorry, I didn’t document which screen it was on). Alternatively, if you surf to any web page, you MIGHT get a 2Wire warning asking you if you’re sure you want to configure your router. Just ignore the warning, tell it to go ahead and do the configuration, and it will restart your router for you.
6. You’re all set! Now you can plug your Airport Extreme or your Time Capsule (or Airport Extreme) into one of the “Local Ethernet” ports on the back of the 2Wire router, and your Time Capsule is now in charge of your network (after you configure your Time Capsule properly). Your Apple router is now in charge of all NAT and port forwarding.
Note: This procedure may or may not work with other models of 2Wire router as well, depending on what firmware those routers are running.
One final note about configuring U-Verse in your home: We also had real difficulty figuring out which ports to plug the split RJ-11 DSL wires into on the 2Wire router. The solution involved LEAVING ONE OF THE RJ-11 DSL WIRES UNPLUGGED FROM THE 2WIRE ROUTER. Only ONE of the RJ-11 DSL wires gets plugged into the 2Wire router, and it gets plugged into the “Phone Line” port instead of the “Broadband” port. You have to leave the “Broadband” port completely empty in order for the 2Wire modem to work properly. Then, plug your telephone into the “Lines 1 & 2″ port. Leave the “Alt Line” port empty. Also, we figured out that your U-Verse TV service will not work unless ALL components (video and audio) are turned ON. We turned off the stereo which provided the audio to the TV, and it completely cut out the TV service. When the stereo came back on, the TV service came back on.
I hope you enjoyed this article. If so, please donate a small amount so that I can continue to post blog articles in the future.
Who is ScottWorld? ScottWorld provides the best FileMaker consultants in Austin & Los Angeles.
Hidden dropbox feature of Lion
Um, yeah… I’d much rather use Dropbox than risk all of my data with some undocumented & unsupported solution by Apple. Apple has never gotten the cloud right, even when they try… why would I try something that they aren’t even standing behind?
I hope you enjoyed this article. If so, please donate a small amount so that I can continue to post blog articles in the future.
Who is ScottWorld? ScottWorld provides the best FileMaker consultants in Austin.
FileMaker and QuickBooks
This topic came up today, so I thought I would share my thoughts on this matter:
If your company is looking for true communication between FileMaker Pro and QuickBooks, unfortunately you can’t use QuickBooks for Mac. You would have to run QuickBooks for Windows within a virtual environment on your Mac (such as VMWare Fusion), because only the Windows version for QuickBooks has APIs which enables great things like Productive Computing’s FMBooksConnector plug-in to work.
- AccountEdge is completely 100% cross-platform!!
- AccountEdge has always been completely networkable
- AccountEdge has dozens of features that QuickBooks for Mac doesn’t have (such as international currency support, the ability to create PO’s from invoices & estimates, integrated payroll directly within the program, and much much more).
- The AccountEdge folks know that most accountants use QuickBooks instead of AccountEdge, so they will provide a FREE COPY of AccountEdge for your accountant.
- Best of all, the AccountEdge people are truly 100% committed to the Mac platform, and they are REAL PEOPLE who actually care about their customers. They also have real U.S. based support with real English-speaking people who actually care about solving your technical problems. It’s a world of difference after dealing with the shoddy company known as Intuit, and their India-based tech support where they read the “answers” from a script.
I hope you enjoyed this article. If so, please donate a small amount so that I can continue to post blog articles in the future.
Who is ScottWorld? ScottWorld provides the best Austin FileMaker consultants.
