Computer Times
December 2000

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At Computer Times, we are always looking for those hidden gems that are not in the mainstream retail stores. We found a great personal information manager that can be downloaded via the Internet from its developer Vladimir Kulemin. This is a mature product with a lot of great features.

xReminder Pro (Retail $19.95) is an easy-to-use, event-based personal information manager that lets you conveniently manage your important dates and times. xReminder Pro runs in the background, sits in the system tray, and makes it nearly impossible to forget birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, appointments, meetings, and other important events. Although xReminder Pro uses very few system resources, its powerful scheduling features and many useful options far surpass those of other popular scheduling software, time clients and on-line timers.

In addition to one-time occurrences, xReminder Pro keeps track of all types of recurring events, from birthdays to meetings that you have on the third Friday of every other month. You can be alerted when the event happens, or at any lead time in advance of the event. The fonts, colors, and sounds (WAVE files, MIDI files, or simple beeps) for each reminder notice are user-customizable. When xReminder Pro reminds you of an event, you can ignore it, accept it (and turn off the reminder), delete it, or hit a "snooze alarm" and be reminded again later.

xReminder Pro lets you organize your calendar effortlessly. Events are easy to categorize by type, including the custom types that you create for your own needs. The event list is searchable, so you can quickly find any key word in your database. Tab- and comma-delimited files can be imported and exported, making it easy to exchange data among applications, and to create backup files.

xReminder Pro offers a customizable Floating Clock, an unlimited number of stopwatches and countdown timers, making it easy to track how long you've been doing something, or keeping you posted about an upcoming event. Most of xReminder Pro's critical functions, including Quick Reminders, are accessible from the system tray icon. All of xReminder Pro's settings can be tailored by each user, including the look and feel of the program, calendar settings, event types, quick reminders, and printing preferences.

XReminder Pro has a number of uses. Below is a list of ideas that will give you a good overview of its functionality to show you how xReminder Pro might work for you.

• Birthdays
  xReminder Pro was originally developed with tracking birthdays in mind. You can impress your friends, relatives and co-workers by remembering their birthday.
• Anniversaries
  Enter wedding dates to keep track of anniversaries. Use the yearly event type and enter the year of the wedding as the year.
• Jobs around the House
  Remember when to do all those little things around the house that are so easy to forget. For example, changing batteries in the smoke detectors, changing the filters in your air conditioning or furnace, adding new fertilizer spikes in the household plants.
• Holidays
  Many holidays happen on unusual days like "second Sunday of May" (American Mother's Day). If there is a holiday like this, try using the Recurrence dialog to enter the recurring event.
• Renewals
  For businesses with sales that should be renewed or repeated periodically enter a daily, weekly, monthly or yearly event to remind you to send the notice or make the call.
• Tracking Stocks and Shares
  Use xReminder Pro to keep track of company year-ends, maturity dates, etc.
• Alarms
  Alarms can be set for any event (except the built-in holidays). Use alarms for sending a birthday card, meetings, lunch dates, quitting time, or waking up in the morning.

xReminder Pro has a rich set of functionality to aid you in managing your events. The following describes the basic features of xReminder Pro:

View by day, week, month, or all events.

Quickly select a day, in Popup Calendar, and quickly move an activity to another day.

If an event occurs at regular intervals, schedule it only once to create a recurring event.

Fully customizable Floating Clock.

Create an unlimited number of stopwatches.

Create an unlimited number of countdown timers.

Easily find events in your Event List.

Easily use filters to find items in your Event List content.

Imports and exports information.

Print your daily, weekly or monthly event list, and use it as your paper day planner.

Easily add national and international holidays to your Event List.

You can customize almost any parameter in the program.

You control how xReminder Pro numbers weeks. Indicate the week that starts the new year as the one that contains January 1, the first full week, or the first four-day week

You can specify the format of a work week.

This is a very mature product that has been improved over several versions. If you already own xReminder, here is a list of changes made in the last few versions.

• Added "Purge accepted events" feature.
• Added chime at the top of the hour.
• Added chime on the half hour.
• Added "Hide reminder" feature for overdue events.
• Added "Remember last snooze period" feature.
• Sound options are stored between sessions.
• Fixed bug with Pop-up Calendar and Printing settings.
• Corrected date displayed for snoozed events.
• Fixed positioning problem with autohide taskbar.

• Corrected representation of the dates in the main window.
• Customizable workweek and week-end days.
• Processing of week-end reminders.
• Unlimited number of custom filters.
• Holidays Import.
• Files with the holidays for many different countries.
• Temporary disabled reminders.
• Smart import of duplicates.
• Basic Hebrew support.
• Fully customizable Clock.
• Swatch Internet Time.
• Printing page setup dialog.
• Ending date for recurrent events.
• Header columns reordering.
• Ascending/Descending sorting.
• Accepted flag is cleared when an event is modified.
• Removed full blocking of reminders while any dialog is active.
• Fixed import from csv files (problem with dates).
• Fixed print preview and printing problems.
• Fixed bug with duration sorting.
• Fixed a small bug with week repetition.
• Fixed a bug with minimized reminders.
• Fixed small bugs.

• Customizable pause for sound repetition.
• Preview feature for new events.
• Collapse/Expand feature for reminder dialogs.
• Predefined start time for different event types.
• Resizable reminder dialogs.
• Custom font and colors for reminder dialogs.
• Always on Top feature for reminder dialogs.
• "Stop repetition of sound" option in reminder dialog's system menu.
• You can use "+SPAN" format for start time field. For example: +22 minutes (from the current time).
• Smart modification of events. (If time parameters don't change).
• Tray calendar has "New Event" right-click pop-up menu.
• Filtering of accepted events.
• Custom font for Date Panel.
• Ability to accept or stop snooze for events in the Main Window.

To find great prices on hardware and software we recommend you start with Office Depot. Just click on the Office Depot ad below and you will be connected directly with Office Depot on the Internet.

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