Focus On the Day at Hand With Today 2.0

I’ve been looking for something like this from Apple for years. It isn’t a very difficult concept. It’s a simple idea, and something that doesn’t require a big window or elaborate interface. Just a simple list of what’s on tap for today, and maybe a quick peek at tomorrow. Well, that’s exactly what you get with Today 2.0.

Today’s claim to fame is a feature which many iCal users have been looking for for quite a while. It’s a small application that lives in your menu bar, and with a click, brings up a small window displaying today’s (or another day of your choice) events from one, some, or all of your calendars. To-do’s are there, (but called Tasks in Today) as well as your major scheduled events. It’s great for two reasons. One, as I mentioned before, you don’t have to have iCal open all the time. I’d much rather have this little guy open than full-fledged iCal for simply viewing events and tasks. Two, sometimes seeing too much into the future can be counter-productive to your day. This single-day approach; seeing only what you need to be productive TODAY– is a great one for productivity-minded folk like myself.

Another one of Today’s major features is full support for actually creating new events and new tasks. New events and tasks created in Today are automatically added to iCal. There is full support for alarms and even saving new ones for frequent use, however the options for running a script or opening a file at a set time are absent. Today 2.0 also brings with it support for the popular iCal alternative BusyCal, giving you the same experience you get with iCal syncing.

In the settings department, you have a good amount of customization options. Tasks can be sorted by calendar, title, priority, and due date, and you can choose to see only tasks due today, or all tasks due in the next 3, 7, 14, or 30 days. A new feature in this, the second iteration of Today.app, is the ability to display tomorrow’s upcoming events underneath today’s. Window transparency can also be set- useful if you’ve enabled the option to keep Today’s window on top of all other windows.

Something I do yearn for in a future iteration of Today, is the ability to scale down the size of the window to a truly tiny size. In order to actually view all of my upcoming events in the app in one view on my 13″ MBP, the window takes up valuable real estate. That being said, it’s just as easy to close the window and reopen from the menu bar (you can also set keyboard shortcuts), but i’d love to be able to dedicate a smaller portion of my screen to it permanently. Also, it isn’t possible to display To-do’s from a certain calendar while not displaying that calendars events. It’s either all or nothing.

All in all though, the minute I tried Today, they had me. It’s the closest you’ll get to MyDay (Microsoft’s version for it’s software suite), and provides a very rich experience for such a small app. It has the “just works” simplicity you expect from a Mac app, without any overkill. Price sits at just $21.95 for a single user. 5-computer family packs are $34.95, and upgrade licenses start at $11.95. If you’d like to try it out, a complete 14-day trial is available for download along with the full version over at Second Gear Software. Requires Mac OS 10.5+

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