JXCirrus Diary

If you have to keep track of several upcoming appointments, you would also need to remember the contact details of other attendants, prepare a paper or presentation and so on. JXCirrus Diary can help you manage such information. The program offers much more than a simple scheduling application. You can use it to schedule your appointments, organize and prioritize your tasks, link them to appointments, manage contacts and more. The best part is that all these features are neatly combined into a single tool, which makes it quite easy to keep an eye on any amount of information.

JXCirrus Diary comes in free and premium versions, for Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. It doesn't ask for any additional tools or services and its hardware requirements are modest. Installing the software is a quick process, which involves only a few basic settings, like selecting a destination folder or creating shortcuts.

The user interface is composed of several panels, on which you can organize your appointments, tasks, contacts and other entries in a tree structure, review a selected item's details and view system messages, like warnings about conflicting time tables. It is also possible to display the appointments and tasks in different calendar types. A toolbar presents a few basic options, for navigating in the tree structure and for creating new top-level entries, tasks, journal entries and addresses. Additional options will be made available on the same toolbar, depending on what items you select in the tree structure. Besides basic copying, cutting, pasting and deleting options, you can also find options for creating child or sibling entries, starting a session for a selected task and more.

New entries can be created on a tabbed window, on which you can specify a huge amount of information, like start and end dates, priority levels, completion percentages, durations and other details. Also, tasks can be recurring, on a daily, weekly, monthly or annual basis. Additionally, the software allows you to assign user-defined or preset tasks to individual entries. Another useful feature is the possibility of assigning tasks as dependencies to scheduled appointments or other tasks. Thus, you can easily remember if you have to prepare something for an upcoming appointment.

Besides changing the completion percentage of tasks or appointments, you can also mark them as complete or postpone them. Furthermore, if you start a session for a selected task, the software will track the time you spend on that task automatically. When you stop a session, the task's completion percentage will be inserted automatically, based on the task's start and end times and on how long the session was active.