Category General

Aeris Calendar v3

Aeris Calendar v3 is now available. Most importantly, this version updates the weather provider feeds, but also provides many other new options. Some of the new features in v3 are described below. If you’ve previously used Aeris Calendar v2, you may want to look through this list to discover some of these new features that you may find useful.

Download: https://www.esumsoft.com/download/?prod=aeriscalendar

Upgrade: If you have an existing v1/v2 license for Aeris Calendar, you can purchase an upgrade for v3:
https://www.esumsoft.com/aeris-calendar/upgrade-aeris-calendar-license/


Weather

Two new weather feeds have been added — the National Weather Service (NWS) serves USA-based locations and OpenWeather provides weather data for world-wide locations.

The new weather ‘Overview’ page shows current , forecast and hourly weather information on a single page. Click the “Weather” page on the left side of the main window and then “Overview” on the right to access this (overview is the default page after you click on “Weather”).

There is a new option to change the theme (background image) based on the current weather. So you’ll see a nice blue sky if the current conditions are “clear” or a rainy image if it’s raining. This option is under the main menu: Tools / Options / Calendar; set the “Theme” to “change theme based on current weather”. You can also set your Windows background to the same image here.


Reminders

Reminders have received many new improvements including a customizable preset list of snooze times so you can quickly snooze the alarm and get back to what you were doing. You can choose how the reminder behaves on an individual basis — windows notification, popup box, or no visual prompt. The new voice option will alert you to reminders using speech.

The list of “today’s reminders” has been improved by showing when the upcoming reminders will occur (e.g. in 32 minutes). This window also allows you to dismiss recurring reminders; for example, if you have a weekly reminder and you’ve already addressed the situation for this week, you can dismiss it before it happens and you won’t be reminded until the following week. Because this reminders list can be very useful, you can assign a global hotkey to access it with a keyboard combination (main menu: Tools / Options / Hotkeys: “Today’s Reminders”)


iCalendar support and Schedule

There is a new page on the main navigation screen called “Schedule”. This is primarily used for online calendars that you’ve added (main menu: Tools / Options / Schedule; these Schedule options can also be accessed on the ‘Schedule’ page by accessing the dropdown menu of the “quick set” button) and also shows native events that you’ve added into Aeris Calendar.

iCalendar is a format used by most online Calendars (such as google.calendar.com). iCalendar events can be set for specific times (e.g. a meeting) or an all-day event (e.g. holidays), or occur across multiple days (e.g. vacation). The ‘Agenda’ display will show these in chronological order while the other displays will display them as blocks of days.

To access your online calendars, refer to this faq.


Notes

You can now include a short description for your notes. The description will be displayed on the calendar instead of the full summary. Notes can now be searched under main menu: Notes / Show all notes; this window is now resizable so you can see more of the notes.


Desklet

The desklet has several new options, which can be accessed by right-clicking on the desklet. Instead of displaying the todo list, you can instead display a 3 day forecast. And if you don’t need to see today’s notes, you can display “bigger weather” so that the current temperature is larger.

If the desklet is hidden behind other windows and you want to access it, click once on the Aeris Calendar tray icon.


Updated graphics

Many of the graphics have been updated and there are several new high-resolution themes/background-images. Updated icons include the navigation icons, several new weather icon sets and the moon phases. The analog clock now uses a pre-rendered image and there are several clock faces to choose from (click on the clock to change them).


Miscellaneous

Unicode support
Calendar can start on other days of the week (main menu: Tools / Options / General)
Tray icon tooltip can display the next reminder (main menu: Tools / Options / Tray Icon – Tray Tips)
Performance improvement

Aeris Calendar – weather feed

The weather feed that Aeris Calendar uses has been disabled by AccuWeather without warning. AccuWeather provided a feed for Aeris to use back in 2008 (when weather.com decided to aggressively change their plans) and while I did receive one email from AccuWeather several years ago starting a conversation about a paid subscription, they continued to allow the weather feed. Unfortunately, Aeris does not generate enough revenue to pay for a weather subscription.

However, the good news is that I’ve been planning for this kind of event. While Aeris has not been the focus of my attention, there has been significant work made for v3.0 with many new features and also has the capability to support additional weather feeds. I am working hard to make v3 available as soon as possible.

If you have a license for Aeris Calendar v2 and you are interested in upgrading to v3, please send an email. There will be an upgrade fee, but this was planned regardless of the current situation. If you are sending from a different email address than the email address registered with your license, please let me know that email address (or your license key).

This post will be updated when more news is available.

Update (Aug 8): AccuWeather did not reply to my request for comment.

Update (Aug 8): Aeris v3.0 is ready and those that emailed me have been sent an email containing information to upgrade. This version supports NWS for USA-based locations and, because of this restriction, this version is not publicly available yet. An update which will support other countries will be available soon.

Update (Aug 31): Aeris v3.1 is now publicly available; more information

Outlook SMTP Oauth2 error

Outlook’s SMTP server currently has an issue with Oauth2. It may be temporary but it has already lasted several days at this point. It should be fixed by Outlook eventually, but to fix this immediately, you can switch POP Peeper to use the password method instead of Oauth2:

  1. Edit the account in POP Peeper
  2. To the right of your “Login name”, change the selection to “Password”
  3. Make sure that you have the correct password entered
  4. Press “Update” to save and then you should be able to send any queued messages (press “Check Mail”)

Website Update

The website has been updated and utilizes new software (WordPress). The main look and feel of the website is very similar, but it should now be easier to navigate to find more of the obscure pages (such as the POP Peeper reference pages).

Why was the website updated?

The previous website — which had been used since the introduction of “esumsoft.com” (POP Peeper v4.0) — was built using Concrete5 (v5). Unfortunately, soon after, Concrete5 updated their software and did not provide a way to upgrade; which means that the entire website would have to be rebuilt from scratch. The website continued to work, so I didn’t feel compelled to upgrade. Until August 2021, and things started to seriously break down.

The first indication that something was wrong was that the contact form no longer worked (if you tried to send an email in early August using the contact form — I apologize! I did not receive it) and I could not find a solution. Soon after that, I realized that I could no longer even edit the content of the website, and that’s when I knew it was time to update.

Why WordPress?

I first looked at the latest version of Concrete5 and Joomla but, unfortunately, they both had problems right out of the gate (one failed during installation and the other had errors when trying to add the first page). My third choice was WordPress and this was ultimately the right decision. I’ve used WordPress for the (old) blog for many years; it auto-updates and I’ve never had an issue with the update. It also has the most community support and is the least likely of any CMS to call it quits. There was a learning curve after using the older version of Concrete5, but once I learned the details, I realized that it has a lot more power than I had before, as well as being more accessible.