A six-sided view
After you install Datebk3, you may be surprised to see the standard Date Book day view. However, a quick glance at the view buttons in the lower-left corner reveals that Date Book's three formats have been replaced by six. The standard day, week, and month views are still there. In addition, there are some new formats available.

A new week view with text (instead of the graphical bars used by the week view we're used to) can be seen in Figure A.

FIGURE A

You can get a good idea of what's planned with Datebk3's text-oriented week view.

Datebook also has a full year view, as shown in Figure B.

FIGURE B

Here's Datebk3's full year view.

A new list view that displays the text of upcoming events, skipping days that contain no appointments, is shown in Figure C.

FIGURE C

Here's what Datebk3's has planned for you (although you should try to avoid blowing up your computer).

Tap one of the buttons to activate a view, or press the plastic Date Book button to switch between views. If you don't want to shuttle between them all, you can select which ones are activated by the button. Select Preferences from the Options menu, then highlight the views you want activated by the hardware button by choosing the Button Uses option (I find that the year view draws too slow for my taste, so I've selected all of the views except for that one). You can also choose which view will be displayed by default when you access Datebk3 by specifying the Starting View option.

You probably noticed that there seem to be more preferences for Datebk3 than in all of your other applications combined! You can tailor how the program operates in the Preferences and More Preferences screens, controlling standard Date Book features like Start and End Times, as well as the ability to choose Hide End Times to reduce the amount of space taken up by appointment descriptions.

Icons
"Oh look," I first thought, "pretty little pictures. How quaint." In order to help you organize your events visually, Datebk3 offers the ability to assign icons to records that will show up in the standard week view; the month view (when the Icon button is selected); and the day view (if you have the Icons checkbox selected in the More Preferences screen). It wasn't until I began reading enthusiastic posts from users on the Palm computer newsgroups and mailing lists that I went back for a second look.

Setting up icons is a little awkward, since the icons themselves aren't built-in to the program. They exist in a Memo Pad file called DATEBK3 and look at first like gibberish, as shown in Figure D.

FIGURE D

This is the apparent icon gibberish stored in a Memo Pad record.

Datebk3 accesses this file when it's launched; the numbers and letters crammed next to the equal sign are hexadecimal representations of which pixels to activate within the 8-pixel-square space used by the icons. Having the file exist outside of Datebk3 means you can create your own icons and edit them into the existing list. The icon code is converted into recognizable images, as shown in Figure E. See the Datebk3 Custom Icon Warehouse for more icons, plus links to icon editors and other icon repositories.