There are presently two nifty applications that you can use for free. Both require MySQL, an outstanding open-source database which is also free.

PocketCalendar - A system-tray calendar and personal time manager.

Address Book - a versatile address book (duh!).

PocketCalendar

While managing my bank account a couple of years ago, I frequently needed to look up recent and future dates, so I wrote a simple application which lives in my system tray and, when clicked, pops up a calendar which conveniently disappears when I hit Escape.

This grew on me, and I enhanced it so that I could record future dates and appointments, and I taught it to give me popup reminders. Most recently, I ported this application to Microsoft's .NET platform, began using MySQL as the data store, and expanded the event/date functionality to include the running of scripts and the sending of email.

The Event Editor lets you create Reminder, EMail, and Script/Execute events which can be one-time events or can recur at regular intervals.

Each event has a name, and any amount of additional textual information can be added to it.

EMail events can include attachments. Script/Execute events allow you to define command-line arguments, startup directory, and other essential scripting parameters.

Pocket Calendar's Event List lists all pending (and/or expired) events.

Download PocketCal application installer.

Find out if you need to install Microsoft's .NET Framework.

Download/Install MySQL.


Address Book

I originally wrote Address Book as a VB application using an Access database. Like PocketCal, I recently rewrote Address Book to take advantage of the free MySQL database, using Microsoft's ADO.NET technology.



Address Book offers advanced searching capability, for those times when you can't quite remember the name "...but it might be something like...."


Download Address Book installer.
Find out if you need to install Microsoft's .NET Framework.
Download/Install MySQL.