Go ahead and laugh: before I slipped the Claris Organizer disk into my Mac, I was using a clunky old Hypercard stack to manage my social calendar. My stack had all the elegance of a pig at a prom.
Organizer replaced all that crud with an unobtrusive floating menu bar that whisks me to relevant bits of info when I need them. Click on the calendar to make a date with Tawanda, and Organizer digs up all of my Tawandas and asks which one. To put Tawanda off another day, I just drag the name to another day, and my calendars adjust automatically.
As the day wears on, Organizer tracks the hours gone by with an ominous red stripe that creeps down the calendar's left edge. You can program alarms to nag you when you're falling behind, and To Do items trail you day after day until you check them off.
I especially like the super-useful credit-card-sized address booklet printout for my wallet. Very cool.
Aside from a couple of interface quirks - such as a find command that retrieves unwanted information - Organizer is quick, thoughtful, and - thankfully - integrated.
Claris Organizer for Macintosh: US$99. Claris Corporation: (800) 325 2747, +1 (408) 987 7000.
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