

Rainlendar
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Rainlendar is a feature rich calendar application that is easy to use and doesn't take much space on your desktop. The application is platform independent so you can run it on all major operating systems: Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.
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- justarandom added Rainlendar as alternative to OurCal
- sredfred liked Rainlendar
- CypherJack added Rainlendar as alternative to DNMX
- POX added Rainlendar as alternative to Tuta Calendar
- POX added Rainlendar as alternative to Scheduler - Calendar Widget
- VipassanaMahale added Rainlendar as alternative to Shared Team Calendar for Microsoft Teams
- POX added Rainlendar as alternative to Ulti-Planner
- POX added Rainlendar as alternative to Day Peek
Comments and Reviews
Elegant, portable, feature-rich, configurable, cross-platform, themeable, everything-able.
It is easily customizable to suit your needs and workflows on many platforms. Integrates nicely with your Outlook calendar at work, your CalDav-based calendars in the cloud (e.g. Owncloud/Nextcloud, DAVical, Radicale, ...).
Dev is a nice and friendly guy, too.
From the screenshots on the website and on AlternativeTo, Rainlendar looks like a desktop accessory, but I am looking for a standalone calendar app.
http://www.rainlendar.net/cms/index.php?option=com_rny_gallery&Itemid=41
From what I can find thus far, Rainlendar Lite appears to come closest to the dying ReminderFox (and even smells like it maybe started as a clone of ReminderFox). Other alternatives appear to lack various features such as: marking a task as important (priority), marking a task as complete (status), snooze, and/or full popup alarm features on both tasks and events. Rainlendar doesn't have an equivalent for "Remind daily until completed" but something like that also seems to be the default (not sure yet). I can't say I've looked at or tried all the others to be sure that this is the best alternative, but I did take a close look at several of the free alternatives and found various reasons to not bother trying them.
Rainlendar Lite also has the advantage that it uses ICS as its base file format, and does an okay job of importing ReminderFox's customized ICS file. (Search for reminderfox.ics in your Firefox profile if you forgot to export it before quitting use of Firefox.) The primary difference between the two uses of ICS is that ReminderFox stores all "reminders" as VEVENTs and Rainlendar stores events as VEVENTs and tasks/todos as VTODOs. Considering that the majority of my "reminders" are best defined as tasks in Rainlendar (only tasks have priority and completion status), I probably should have edited reminderfox.ics to find-and-replace all VEVENT text with VTODO before importing it (try that at your own risk but it looks like it would work). There is a mass edit feature (unhelpfully called Change Fields) that can be used to change all selected events to tasks, but it also removed the alarm setting while doing this for some reason (possibly a bug that will be fixed someday). Thus, I had to look up the TRIGGER tags in reminderfox.ics to re-add the original alarms to the tasks.
Next, these two apps interpret a task’s start and end times differently. ReminderFox triggers the alarm based on the start time. Rainlender triggers it based on the "due" time. Thus, I had to go through all the tasks and uncheck the start time while also changing the due time (invisibly set by ReminderFox to one day later) to what the start time is/was. I didn’t really have to uncheck the start time, but it felt cleaner that way. You do, however, have to leave the due time checked, because you cannot set an alarm on the task without it.
Anyhow, Rainlendar did a fair job of interpreting reminderfox.ics literally but it ignores ReminderFox’s custom X-REMINDERFOX tags. It would be nice if they added a feature to import reminderfox.ics as a custom ICS format to read in those tags, as well as to perhaps interpret VEVENT, DTSTART, DTEND differently, and such. They could attract all the ReminderFox users more easily if they took this relatively simple step.
Because Rainlendar does not read the custom ReminderFox tags, you will also have to go back through all your completed tasks and mark them as "Completed to now". There is a bug here that sometimes forces you to try this more than once to get the task fully up to date. Either way, this is not to hard, and not surprising that you have to update them. Also, another caveat with Rainlendar, you cannot unmark the most recent occurrence of a repeating task as complete (like an undo of sorts, like I believe I could with ReminderFox... but not sure since I can’t remember the last time I needed to do it).
While doing all this editing, Rainlendar crashed several times. It appears to crash consistently after 15 or so edits. Very disappointing and one more reason why I can’t recommend it highly. When done editing, however, it has so far ran stable enough.
Finally, Rainlendar doesn’t by default show itself on the taskbar like the ReminderFox alarm window does. I relied on that taskbar appearance a lot with ReminderFox. You can tell Rainlendar to not "Hide from taskbar" (lots of double-negatives like this in their settings) but you cannot tell it to do this only for their alarm window, like I wish it could. Note that, in comparison to ReminderFox, you can still snooze a single item in the alarm window, but you have to instead right-click the item to find the snooze and completion options (which is okay by me). The snooze options are customizable but it breaks the alarm to do so (requiring restarting the app). (Also, I have yet to figure out how to turn off their Today window... their setting for this does not appear to work.)
Overall, Rainlendar suffers from too much flexibility hidden in too many settings windows which are too difficult to understand. Also, too many bugs (as of v2.18) on top of a generally sluggish UI. But, once wrangled (after a few days of maddening wrangling), it can operate as a fairly similar ReminderFox replacement (so far).
so you are giving it a bad review based on It's inability to do exactly what this other program did? Also maybe try the non-lite version. it does a lot.
Reply written Dec 7, 2023
Have been using it for years, it runs my whole life
The best & most beautiful, not to mention the most HELPFUL & feature-filled software for to-do lists, events, alarms, calendars there is. It's ESSENTIAL. You can even use their pro version for free if you don't mind "unregistered version" next to all of your events in the event list. I certainly don't mind it for now, until I buy it. It does everything you could want & looks amazing while doing it. There are TONS of awesome skins out there & they aren't that ugly, minimal, boxy boring crap either. They are ACTUAL skins, worth downloading (check deviantart, it's where I go). There's a fantastic Steampunk one or two as well. Multiple alarms for each event you set, with any sound file as the alarm & repeated as often as you want, as well as repeat the event itself with many options. The to-do list features RULE, with primary AND secondary sorting, which allows me to have it sort primarily by category (e.g. "Download" or "Stuff to Buy") and then list each item underneath that category & sort those by something like priority or alphabetically. You can have as many to-do lists as you want, with different skins for each one. You can have multiple calendars. You can connect it to your Google account & sync between your android phone & it! Tons of options for customization, tons of options for everything, so you can tweak it all. You can even edit the skin .ini file in notepad (or notepad++ preferably) & change fonts & colors of any skin you like (not 100% sure if this works on the new kind of skins though). This is something I do, since I like to make everything my own. This is a program I cannot live without, simply will not live without & you shouldn't live without. I'm this much of a fan because it's that good of a program. I send a big kiss to the developers for being awesome! The only thing it doesn't do is give you a bj & make you a sandwich afterwards, but hey, that's not what it's for. ;)
Rainlendar Pro is the first (and the only so far) software I've paid for. I have a bunch of google calendars that I use from different places on different machines (home desktop, netbook, ...), and this application makes it easy for me to create events. Even google's default notification works if set (I use SMS for one of my calendars).
And it looks amazing while doing all of that, too. It's gotten even better and better over the years. It's a rare gem and it's highly underutilized & unappreciated.
Reply written Jul 20, 2014