Rainlendar is a desktop calendar application that lets you organize your schedule and tasks with compatibility with calendars across various systems. With Rainlendar you can synchronize your Outlook, iCalendar and Google calendars, you can even make changes to your offline and online schedules.

VISUAL STYLE AND FEATURES: When you run Rainlendar for the first time, it opens up as a normal desktop calendar with the current date circled in red and a system tray icon. Adding a new task or event is as simple as right clicking and selecting the action. On the calendar interface, you can navigate forwards or backwards in time and set events as well as to-do lists for specific dates. Events and tasks are displayed in separate sidebars-the three are separate windows, and you can position them anywhere on your desktop, so even if your desktop is cluttered, you don't have to worry about creating a special corner to run Rainlendar. When you add an event, a window appears, and this is where you input the summary of the event,
the location and the start and end time.

There are two check boxes with which you can declare the event as 'Private' or an 'All day event'. Other features include the ability to set an alarm for your event and tag your event from an impressive 29 built-in categories. When you tag an event under a category, forinstance, 'Birthday', Rainlendar marks it with a cute icon on your desktop calendar. If your event is periodic, say a dental appointment, you can set the frequency-days, months, years, or set it to run forever, or only for a specified number of times, or until a specific day. You can set 'exception' dates, where the event is not supposed to occur. Similarly, you can set up your to-do lists.

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To customize your calendars, such as changing skins, importing information, setting alarms sound and action, go to the 'Options' menu. Apart from changing the appearance of the desktop calendar with 'Skins', of which there are only
two predefined skins, although you can download or create more, you can also tweak your calendar by setting the week's start day, set the transparency levels and mouse over levels. My favorite feature was the ability to set the language to Hindi, something not found in many applications. You will, however, need to download the language support file separately from the website.

Some of the cool features include the ability to hide or view the calendar on your desktop, event list and to-do list. As for start by entering your name, email address and password. When the calendar has been successfully added you can change its settings to 'Enable', 'Read Only', 'Visual category', 'Poll Frequency', suppress errors, keep offline copy and use default calendar alarms. Right clicking and selecting 'Refresh' updates the desktop calendar to reflect the current events. Note that if the timings seem off, check the time settings on your Google account.

In a similar method you can add iCalendar, Microsoft Outlook, Network Shared calendars. With 'Hotkeys' you can also assign keyboard shortcuts to actions like adding new events and tasks. Advanced users can change the time and date formats, customize weekend days, create additional categories and set the proxy settings. With 'Manager' you can merge your events and to do list items, import and export to iCalendar or Rainlendar file formats, print and backup.
FOR: Neat desktop calendar to manage your events and tasks which helps you to stick to your schedule.

AGAINST: The Lite version, which is free, only allows you to import the iCalendar format calendars.