HappyDay

Ever been in the unfortunate situation of forgetting a friend’s, relative’s or colleague’s birthday or anniversary, and had to make up with a sorry card or an expensive dinner? If the answers to these are “Yes”, then HappyDay is the application for you.

This free application integrates two of the most used built-in applications of the Palm: Address Book and Date Book. The built-in address book has no birthday/anniversary field. However, it does have multiple custom fields that you can rename and use as you wish. And this is how HappyDays works. First you need to rename any one of the custom fields to ‘Birthday’. Then for every contact in the Address Book for whom you wish to store a birthday and/or an anniversary you simply enter the date in that field, with or without the year.

On running HappyDays, it scans the address book database and picks up all the entries containing a date and displays the list. Using a couple of simple codes in the date field, you can specify that the value is for a birthday or an anniversary. HappyDays shows this up appropriately in the list. Once you are satisfied that the list is correct and up to date, choose ‘Date Book Notify’ from the menu. This shows a pop-up dialog that lets you customize settings like whether you wish to keep existing entries in the Datebook, how many days before the event should the alarm be set, and for how many years this event is to be repeated. On continuing, it inserts events into the DateBook calendar. Now you have no fear of forgetting important dates.

HappyDays lets you clean up these entries, create to-do lists, use lunar dates instead of solar, pick up names from other address book formats like TealPhone and SuperNames. And although this is not an application you’d use very often, it can be a lifesaver when it comes to making sure you keep your near and dear ones happy. This application can be found at

http://jmjeong.com/palm/happydays.

Vinod Unny is a Technology consultant at iSquare Technologies