We’re calendar geeks. Without iCal, we’d be completely lost. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. For one, we often wish there was a quick way to view dates on the calendar without having to switch over to iCal and break the flow of what we’re currently working on. A simple day/date display in iCal would come in handy for everything from scheduling deadlines to planning weekend trips with friends. DateLine is a donationware application that adds a lightweight calendar display to your Desktop and also gives you one-click access to iCal.
Keep an eye on your calendar in DateLine's horizontal window.
DateLine runs as a standalone app, so the easiest way to include it seamlessly in your daily Mac regimen is to add it to your Login Items (System Preferences > Accounts > Login Items). DateLine’s interface is a resizable horizontal strip that displays the days and dates of the current month. There’s a small pip to indicate the current day, and that’s it. It’s relatively unobtrusive and perfect for folks like us who live and die by the calendar. Clicking on a specific day launches iCal’s Weekly view, focused on the particular day you’ve chosen, though we’d like options to use Month or Day view instead.
DateLine’s preferences allow you to control the width of the display (there’s no option for a vertical calendar, unfortunately), as well as setting colors and choosing the display level. We opted for the Floating Windows setting, which forces DateLine to remain visible above all our other windows, but frequent users of Exposé will appreciate options to display DateLine unobtrusively on the Desktop icon level.
Simple way to keep an eye on your calendar. Open-source. Universal binary.
Cannot set view mode for opening iCal. No vertical option. A rolling four-week calendar would be more useful.
