Rainlendar Desktop Calendar

When I was using Windows XP, I had Webshots manage my Wallpaper. One of the features of Webshots was to display the calendar on the Desktop. Additionally, I also displayed my to-do list (and a short phone list) on my desktop using Windows’ Active Desktop Feature. Read about it here and here

When I moved to Linux (Ubuntu specifically) I needed similar functionality.  I came across kdesktopweb, but I use gnome, so it was not an option. I also looked at conky, but doesn’t look as polished, as Windows’ equivalent. Enter Rainlendar

As the Website mentions, Rainlendar is a customizable desktop calendar. It works on Windows, Linux as well as Mac OS X.  For Linux, it supports Debian/Ubuntu natively as .deb files, other distro will need to use tar.gz files.

Installation

Installing Rainlendar is pretty straight forward  (Isn’t everything on Linux these days ? ) I downloaded the .deb file. Firefox is smart enough to determine that this is installation file, and invoked the installer. It needed two more packages (tofromdos and patch) Depending on your setup it may need more or less additional packages. On Debian based system like Ubuntu, this is least of the concern, If you have an active internet connection, the additional packages wille be downloaded and installed for you.

After the installation is complete, you will see an additional entry titled Rainlendar2 under Applications->Office.

Calendar

Rainlendar displays a monthly calendar. It also has an option to show multiple months at-a-glance, as well as an yearly calendar showing all the twelve months of current calendar year.  It is configured with a Default Calendar, but you can add more calendars like personal, business (you can name them anything). The fee version supports only iCalendar file format, that too for local files. Pro version supports more rich calendaring functionality like sharing the calendar, as well as support for Google Calendar.

Right clicking on the calendar brings up a menu. Here you can do operations like choosing which windows to display. It shows monthly calendar, an empty to do list and events list by default.Since I did not have any appointments set at the time, I turned off the Events Window.  If you have multiple calendars, you can choose which calendars to display on the desktop. Similarly you can also choose to view previous/next months or any specific month of the current calendar year.

Rainlendar To Do List

Events and To do

Adding new events and tasks was as simple as clicking on the TODO or EVENTS Window. You get a dialog box that allows you to fill in the details. One caveat, if you created an task for a future date, it won’t appear in your to-do list. e.g. I need to send status report every weekend, so I created a recurring task for this. But it did not appear in my to-do list till Friday.

Skinning

Rainlendar ships with two skins. Shadow4 which is the default skin and Chromophore.  You can change the skins by Right Click->Options->Skins tab. Shadow4 has lot of Widgets like Weather RSS, TV to name a few. It also has an option to display the contents of a text file. This could be very useful to display things like Plan of the Week, but this feature appears unstable. Rainlendar crashed several times, when Files Widget was enabled. Once I removed the Files Widget, it appears to be stable.

Other Skin Chromophore is much more simpler. Here you can choose the color of the Rainlendar displays. The Brown color gels well with default Brown theme of Ubuntu. Since I have switched to Clearlooks, and blue wallpaper, I chose the Blue theme for Chromophore.

To sum it up,  one can say that Rainlendar is  a decent replacement for Desktop Calendar, and To-Do list on the desktop.

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• Rainlendar Features (rainlendar.com)
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1. Apart from the mini phone list, I also have my Plan of the Week, as another HTML on my Desktop. At the end of each week, I create the plan of next week (Friday 4-6PM). Again, it is very easy to convert any piece of text into an HTML.
2. Use a web page as Sticky Note to yourself. No Coding needed. Check this out.
3. You can put your Google Calendar on your Desktop.

Please share your ideas in the comments

I recently joined a smaller organization. Although there are over 50+ employees, I need to interact with about 5-6 people of regular basis, and another 4-5 on not so regular basis.  So although they have an Excel document containing a big list, I don’t want to refer to that document every time I need to make a call, so I created a short .html file containing the compressed extension list. Here is how you can do it too.

Create a phone list

1. Create a simple spreadsheet containing the name and extension. You can get creative and add their cell numbers as well, if you want.
2. Save this as HTML file. This option is available in OpenOffice.org (3.x) and I think even in MS Office as well
3. OR You can create your phone list as csv file, and use this script to convert it to HTML
4. If you like to have more control of how your HTML looks,  you can hand-code HTML code using simple HTML table. I used gvim to edit the file, but you can use your favorite editor.

Use it on your Desktop

1. Right Click on your Windows Desktop, Click on Properties Menu option.  You will be presented with Display Properties page
2. Click on the tab named Desktop
3. Click on Customize Desktop button located at the bottom of the tab.
4. Click on the tab named Web
5. Click on New, and point (using Browse button provided by the wizard, if needed) to the newly created HTML Page.
6. Make sure that your newly added page shows up in the list, and that the checkbox  is selected.
7. Click OK, to close the Desktop Items dialog. Also close the Display Properties dialog by clicking OK
8. Now you should see your Phone list on your Windows Desktop.

Now, whenever you need to refer to the phone list, all you need to do is press Windows+D to have a look at your desktop.

Note : I’ve tested this only on Windows XP, instructions might differ for Vista.