One of the things that disappoints me about the Mac’s menubar compared to other OS’s status bars (see Windows’ taskbar, etc.) is the lack of a calendar.  Sure the menubar clock can show you the date and time, but that’s pretty standard for any desktop operating system.  If you click on the clock in any modern version of Windows or Linux, it pulls up a simple calendar.  Depending on the system, you can sometimes schedule things, see appointments, etc., all of which Mac’s menu-clock seems to lack.  So I started using MenuCalendarClock instead.

MenuCalendarClock (MCC for short) shows your local time, shows the day in a small flip-calendar style logo next to it, and goes in the same place at your built-in menubar clock, so you can disable the old one if you want.  That’s kind of nice when you compare other menubar-calendar apps that put their own logo up in the menubar next to your other apps.  When you click on it, though, a nice slick calendar rolls down to show you this month and its appointments.  You can scroll through the months and see all of your other scheduled appointments.

The key here is that there is an iCal version and a Microsoft Entourage version, so whichever program controls your scheduling needs is the one you’ll see in your menubar.  But they are 2 different apps, so you should only run one.  Also, there is no version for Microsoft Outlook as of this posting.   The app can do all of this for free, but there is a paid version.  For $19.95, you can get more stuff, such as the ability to add new events to your calendar straight from the app (in the free version, you have to do it from iCal or Entourage).  Personally I feel $19.95 is a rather high price for a calendar app like this, but that doesn’t detract from the convenience that MCC provides.  You can check out your version of MCC at http://www.objectpark.net/, where the software is available for Tiger, Leopard, & Snow Leopard.