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v.3.2, (0.90 Mb) last changed: February 28,
2006. What's New , For Developers Download yvReminder: Simtel.Net , local file (slow) |
This program reminds you about future (and past) birthdays and (wedding) anniversaries. Information is taken directly from your Address Book (list of Contacts), this allows you to avoid duplicating the same information in several places. These Address Books are supported: Address Book of MS Outlook Express, Contacts of MS Outlook, and any other address book, that may be presented in XML format.
To edit the list of contacts (i.e. friends) and their anniversaries (the "List of events"), you continue using your "Address Book Application" (Outlook Express, etc.). However you may change (and view) full information for any contact and interact with him (or her) directly from yvReminder.
With a single click, you may:
- send new message (E-Mail) to selected contact, with the help of your Mail
Program;
- go to contact's Personal or Business Web Page in the Internet;
- make a phone call dialing any personal, mobile or business phone number by
your Telephony services (TAPI);
- export the whole List of events to the HTML file. So you may copy or print
the list with your Internet Browser...
yvReminder doesn't substitute any of these programs - instead, it cooperates with them, making routine operations for you.
yvReminder launches automatically each time system starts (its shortcut is
placed in the "Startup" folder). It scans for the dates (satisfying the
"AutoClose scan filter") and closes in a case nothing was found (due to the
"AutoClose=1" command line parameter). To launch yvReminder without any
conditions, click it's shortcut 
on your Desktop.
Columns of the "List of events" and additional information for the selected contact (below the List of events) are customizable: you can choose from the long list of properties as much (or as few) propreties to be shown, as you wish. This list of properties includes almost every information, that is stored in Address book. You may even see such useful data, as "Last Modification Date" of contact's record, that is not shown in "Address book" application itself :-).
Events in the table may be sorted by any column, in ascending or descending order. To change sorting order, click on title of an appropriate column. Change size of program window and widths of columns as you wish. Your settings will be stored.
The program is supplied with many user interface languages: Chinese, Czech,
Croatian, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian,
Russian, Serbian, Slovenian, Spanish-Argentina, Ukrainian, Valencia and Vietnamese
- with very easy procedure to add your language,
if it's not in the list.
Characters in the "What" column mean:
"B" - Birthday;
"A" - Anniversary.
If both Bithday and Anniversary dates are indicated for one contact, that contact will have two lines in the list (one for each event)!
This native MS Outlook support was successfully tested with MS Outlook 2007 and 2003.
To access MS Outlook contacts, you have to select in the menu "File"->"Select Address Book Type..."->"MS Outlook Contacts".
yvReminder lets you select any contacts folder (not only Default contacts folder, as in case of "Method 2" described below). To edit contact's information, yvReminder opens the same Outlook "Contact" window, as in Outlook itself.
This method successfully worked from the first versions of yvReminder for MS Outlook 98, 2000, 2002 and 2003. Unfortunately, this method doesn't work for MS Outlook 2007.
That "Address Book of MS Outlook Express" is called Windows Address Book (WAB). In order to use yvReminder with MS Outlook, your computer has to be configured "To share Contacts between Outlook and Outlook Express". See this link for more details.
If the address book is configured to share contact information with Outlook Contacts, you may use yvReminder and don't bother about "What address book yvReminder is looking in" - the information is the same and you may, as stated above, edit individual contacts through yvReminder!
To access MS Outlook contacts using this "Method 2", you have to select in the menu "File"->"Select Address Book Type..."->"Windows Address Book - WAB".
- Try to think of Address Book as of Book Of Contacts (as I do) and not as a list of emails.
Each contact (each person) in this book needs to have his (her) own record. It's naturally, because each record have only one field for name, not only for birthday and anniversary.
There is no any problem, when more than one person (and so more than one record in the address book) have the same email. So when, for example, my friend and his wife have the same email, I create records for each of them with the same email. In the case they decide to have personal email for each of them (for any reason), I'll have to change email only.
Looking at address book this way, there is also not a problem, when someone doesn't have any email. I don't count this record as a "fake email" but rather as a person, who can not be contacted by email (yet!). In a case he (or she) will get one, I'll have only to add the new email to the existing record.
Of course, to organize your Address Book for convenient access you have to create "Folders" in the Address book and move records to that folders. For example, I have folders "Business", "Travel", "Programmers", "Rare", so I don't have to scroll the whole long list every time. Note, that if you didn't experiment with folders in Address Book before, you better make a backup of that Address Book before you start changes. The file of the Address Boook is usially called yourlogin.wab (yuri.wab in my case).
To change language of the program's user interface, in the menu of yvReminder go to the "Language" and select your language from the list of available languages.
If your language (language file) is not in the list of available languages yet, you may add new language file, using any existing language file from this list as a template for translation (or customization) of any program message or string. To add new language, at first, select language, that is most familiar to You, and then select "Language->Add new language file..." menu item to process with adding new language file. After this new language file will be created, you may see that your language's name appeared in the list of languages (that name is stored in the line 10002=... entry of the language file). Now you may start your translation, i.e. you may start editing existing language file (see below).
To update translation of existing language, select that language and then select "Language->Edit language_name language file..." menu item to start editing (in Windows Notepad editor). Please note, that in order to see all characters of Your language correctly (with "umlauts" etc.) you have to save the language file in Unicode UTF-8 Encoding.
After you've saved language file, select the same language in the "Language" menu to see the effect of your translation.
If you've added new language file or updated existing one (or even this page with program description) into new language, please send them to me to be included in the next version of this program. So you will help people, speaking your language, to be comfortable with yvReminder. In order to find out, where is your language file located (so you can attach it to the message, being sending to me), select "Language->Open language file's folder" menu item. That folder will be opened with Windows Explorer (it's usially c:\Program Files\yvReminder\Language\).
Freeware, i.e. at no cost. If you like this program, please consider donating.
The program is distributed "as is", without any warranties explicit or implied.
(c) 2001-2007 Yuri Volkov, Moscow, Russia
We, users of yvReminder, (me also :-) ) all are different, and we want our tools to be convenient for us (if this is possible). So, customization and internationalization were the two main priorities for this release of yvReminder. Here are results of this work:
In April 2003 Microsoft released new update (Cumulative Patch for Outlook Express (330994)), that has a bug, preventing yvReminder from showing dates of events. As a result, after installation of this patch you wouldn't see any events in versions of yvReminder before v.1.14. So please upgrade to the last version!
As it appeared, the workaround, that was found against this bug, doesn't work for some software configurations (there are reports from Windows XP users). If all the days of events are "January 1, 1601", this means, that yvReminder tries to interpret "almost zero" as a valid date... so this means, that WAB API bug is "wider" for your sofware configuation... So maybe the only way for you is to uninstall that buggy OE update: it is called "Outlook Express Update Q330994" in "Control Panel -> Add/Remove Programs".
September 13, 2004
Good news came for Windows XP users: we've got reports, that Windows XP Service
Pack 2 (SP2) fixed the above mentioned bug: yvReminder works on Windows XP
again!
New localizations: Chinese Simplified, French, Serbian and Slovenian.
Customizable font for the grid (in the Menu go to the Tools->Options).
Color coding of events: you may set different background colors for birthdays and anniversaries, for future and past events.
yvReminder window (and the list of events) are resizable both vertically and horizontally! Maximize window (or increase its height) to see more events at once.
New localizations: Valencia and Danish.
The installation package has usual yvReminder_Setup.exe that includes everything needed to install yvReminder on your computer.
If both Bithday and Anniversary dates are indicated for one contact, that contact will have two lines in the list (one for each event)!
New language of user interface: Spanish-Argentina.
One new column in the list: Day of week of the event
3 new languages of user interface: German, Croatian and Italian.
Export table with events to HTML file.
4 new columns in the list: E-mail; First, Middle and Last names.
Width of program window is resizable - easy to fit all the columns in it.
2 new languages of user interface: Dutch and Polish.
Yes, yvReminder has been grown enough to be able to integrate with other applications. If you have any suggestions, please write to me, and we will make new combined quality!
yvReminder supports any address book, that may be presented in XML format and may be accessed by URL (or by file name). You may customize yvReminder to support new type of Address Book, by adding (XSLT) decription of this Address Book (i.e. Address Book metadata, including description of its format) to the list of "Custom XML Address Books". See below for details.
As it appeared, almost none of contemporary "Address Book Applications" (Mail programs, Messengers, etc.) (as of September 2006) provides access to its Address Book (list of contacts) in XML format, but there were still two great reasons to implement this feature:
As you may guess, XML format customization is quite a technical task. But I want to assure you, that you will not have to learn XSLT (XSL Transformations) to complete this task: there are already two pairs of examples (see XSLT files in yvReminder/CustomXML local folder and corresponding sample address books in Sample folder under it), that you may use as a starting point for your "Address Book type". If your "Address Book Application" doesn't have any external XML format yet, you may use yvReminder's native format: "Native "XML Address Book" of yvReminder" - and don't write any new "Address Book type description" for yvReminder.