What about adding new events and tasks to the calendar with Blotter? The app would be worthless without this capability, and Blotter makes it as easy as either clicking on the menu bar icon and selecting New Event or New Task, or by setting up a keyboard shortcut. The two main calendars (home and work) showed up in their proper colors. One of the few negatives I see with this app is that for some reason, the color of one of my calendars - which is orange in iCal - came over as a sickly olive color in Blotter. Within the Blotter preferences, there is a setting for displaying all iCal calendars or just a selected few. However, it's possible to hide windows temporarily by pressing Command-H repeatedly while in the Finder, and that makes it very easy to hide windows very quickly, glance at the Blotter calendar, and then return to work without taking my hands off of the keyboard. On my 27' iMac I tend to always have a lot of windows open, so they obscure the view of Blotter and also defeat the purpose of the app a bit. There's a 'narrow' mode that displays just the date, To Do list, and the Right Now mini-view, but it seems to defeat the purpose of Blotter for me. The calendar can be set to take up a lot of screen real estate or a smaller area, and in the smaller views it is movable to various locations on your desktop.

If you use Google calendars, no problem - as long as you're subscribing to those calendars in iCal, they'll show up on Blotter. It's always there on the desktop for you to see if you need it, much in the manner those desk blotter calendars were on our real desktops in the past, soaking up coffee spills and giving us a look at what was coming up in the next few days or weeks. Instead, it is meant to work with iCal so that you don't need to actually open your calendar to look at it. I have my Blotter calendar set to fade out after 60 seconds - a quick click on the menu bar icon brings it back to full intensity.īlotter isn't meant to replace iCal.

There's also a list of To Do items, as well as a 'Right Now' mini-view showing the next four or five hours at a glance. The current date is listed as a large number, with the month, year, and day of the week listed below. By default, it shows the current week, but can be set in preferences to show the seven days or only weekday dates. The main feature of Blotter is the beautiful translucent calendar that appears on your Mac desktop.

You can disable notifications at any time in your settings menu.

How to get a calendar on mac desktop