Built-In Applications
Date Book
The Date Book application is the primary Palm OS application for dealing with time. It is also one of the most replaced and augmented of the built-in applications. These replacements and augmentations are valuable to a great many Palm OS device users. However, many users find the standard Date Book application can in fact do not only things they want, but things they did not know they wanted.
Fundamentally, Date Book is a calendar and clock. Date Book items are assigned to calendar dates and (optionally) times. Each item can repeat, that is, appear on multiple days. The repetition can be daily or every so many days; on certain days of the week; on a certain day of the month (such as “the 15th of every month” or “the 3rd Wednesday of every month”); or yearly. Items have a description, an optional memo, and an optional alarm. The alarm can sound a specified number of minutes before the item’s time. You should be able to use Date Book’s appointment and alarm features to record in advance every timed commitment or event you have. Being surprised by or unsure of—ever—a commitment you made, or an event you knew about, should become a thing of the past.
Date Book offers several views: a daily view, a weekly view, a monthly view, and an appointment/to do view that lists both a day’s appointments and the To Do list. The daily view offers the most detail, obviously, and the other views are useful for overviews.
In addition to the obvious uses of listing appointments, meetings, part time work schedule, parking ban dates, bill due dates, daylight savings time changes, special trash pick-up dates, movie opening dates, television special times and channels, store special sales dates, reminders to set up doctor or veterinarian appointments, holy days and seasons, and so forth, Date Book can be used to remember special dates such as birthdays and anniversaries. These could be yearly repeating untimed items. Date Book can be used as an alarm clock: this could be done with a single or repeating alarmed item. Date Book can be used as a daily journal: this could be held in the memo of an untimed item called, for example, Daily Journal. (The freeware program DES Journal can create and edit such items for you.) Date Book can keep notes from, or notes you prepare for, a meeting or appointment: the memo of the item for the event can hold these. Date Book can serve as a tickler file: if you need to do something at a future date and want not be reminded of it until then, you can use an untimed event on the appropriate date to remind you.
If you do not like the built-in To Do List, Date Book can keep your To Do List: this could be an untimed item called, for example, To Do Today, with your list in the attached memo. You might want the same list to go from day to day, and make the To Do Today have a daily repeat; or have separate weekday and weekend lists, and have one To Do Today item repeat Monday through Friday and a second item repeat Saturday and Sunday; or you might want a new list every day, and create a new untimed item every day.
Date book can also be used to replace a book of daily meditations, if you use such. Simply create a “Daily Meditation” untimed entry, and attach a note with the text of the day’s meditation—a process that takes only a minute or two a day, and ensures you actually focus on the meditation. You can refer to the daily meditation throughout the day without pulling out your book of meditations. At the end of the day, you can change the date on the daily meditation entry to move it to the next year, where it will wait for you—or you can set it to repeat yearly. A full year’s worth of daily meditations may take 200 to 500 kilobytes. This is a fair amount on a 2 megabyte device but almost unnoticeable on an 8 megabyte or larger device.
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Copyright © 2002 Brian Hetrick
Page last updated 15 July 2003.
