My Vista Experience: Date/Time Tray

Quite frequently I need to have access to a calendar to find out what day a certain date is (or vice versa). However loading my Outlook or GCal to do this simply takes too much time and when you have Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Illustrator and other graphic intensive, memory hogging applications running at the same time this certainly doesn’t help.

More often than not I would just use the date/time system tray and browse the date as if I’m changing the date and time. (am I the only one doing this? Or is it more common than I think?). However this can be annoying if I accidentally pressed the ‘OK’ button.

Well.. this morning I discovered that the new Windows Vista date/time tray bar allows you to do this quite easily. Click on the same spot and you’ll get this screen:


Apart from the obviously better looking clock, I can now ‘browse’ the date freely without having to worry that I’ll accidentally change the system date on my PC. I can still do this by going into the date and time settings panel if I wish to. Because you don’t do this very often, I think this is a good call made by Microsoft (Mind you, I don’t make this statement very often). I also like the Daylight Saving information that’s easy to understand rather than just a simple checkbox to “Automatically adjust for daylight savings time”

Clicking on the calendar header also reveals a new effect. The calendar will ‘zoom out’ to reveal the whole month of that year (year view). Click the header again and it’ll display the years from 1999 to 2010 (decade view). Click again and you are now viewing the calendar grouped in decades (century view? *gasp*)