Now Up-to-Date anniversary of 15 years

I have no recollection why I ever started using this piece of software when it was called Aldus Datebook. I must’ve been incredibly bored to do something other than play Spaceward Ho! on my PowerBook 140 to pass the time. Looking back, my life wasn’t very eventful nor worth documenting but I’m glad I did. The application helped me record the recent past in Austin and eventually, my turbulent year in exile also known as the time I wasted in North Carolina, the Indianoplace of the Southleast.

Then Adobe acquired Aldus around the same time. I can’t recall why they bothered. The only thing Aldus had of value was PageMaker and Adobe has since replaced it with InDesign. Meanwhile, Datebook remained until Adobe sold it off to Now. I stayed with Datebook through some time in 1995 when I tried this Star Trek themed competitor Espresso published by the After Dark guys. Needless to say, Espresso proved to be underwhelming and a waste of money.

Thankfully, Now’s Up-to-Date was bundled for free with every PowerComputing system. It made up for their awful Now Utilities which only Mac OS-driven systems less stable, as if System 7.5 needed any more assistance there. I was reluctant to go back since I spent money on Espresso yet my reservations were assuaged after running the two side-by-side.

Currently, the venerable calendar is in the hands of Power On who treated it with greater respect and care to get it to function in the initial versions of Mac OS X. Its future looked doubtful after Qualcomm gobbled up Now for reasons even more nebulous than Adobe’s with Aldus. I tried the public beta version 4 Qualcomm released and it was terrible. Somehow Power On had the rights to get back to functional version 3-something to save it from the brink of extinction.

I continue to cling to version 4.5.3 due to the prohibitive cost of upgrading to 5 and Power On’s long-delayed, long-awaited version X or Nighthawk or whatever they’re going to label it. The company promises it will work with my iPhone yet they’re not going to integrate the new unified calendar-contact application with WebDAV-derived open standards CalDAV and CardDAV. Rather disappointing compared to what iCal can do, for free.

My current plan is to keep plugging along with Up-to-Date for as long as it functions in Snow Leopard while running iCal alongside it. Hopefully, Apple will find a way to incorporate the features I’ve loved for over a decade into iCal: banners, icons, 11-levels of importance (over four), calls (another form of “to do”) and specials, all of which can have reminders, times and alarms.