I went looking for a nice little freeware reminder app which would help me catch all those wonderful shows with my new toy. Found a few, though many of them, such as Multi-Reminders by Solway, were meant for remembering dates (such as birthdays) and not exact times.

But Week Scheduler (use of frames seems to have destroyed the usability of the anchor, but it’s down there) by Johannes Wallroth does take times, up to sixteen of them for each day. It’s pretty plain in looks, nothing fancy, which is the way I like my apps. The blinking alert pop-up is noticeable enough, though — even without the sound, which I find annoying (though not the most annoying alert ever heard). You can disable it for all alerts or none.

Though sixteen reminders per day are probably enough for me, it’s probably not the case with everyone else, so that’s a minor con — along with the fact that there’s no installer. I’ll give it four out of five stars.

Free Notes by Power Soft is a lot more colorful in its approach, beginning with the eye-hurting green dashboard it opens up above your tray on startup. Luckily, you can set it to minimized on startup using the options window, and I applaud the ability to also tweak the looks of the yellow post-it note like reminder popups to my liking.

In fact, had I not been given the choice of font to replace the default Comic Sans used in the notes, I wouldn’t have stood for it. So four out of five for Free Notes too.

So which is it? For now, I’m sticking to Free Notes, but like I said, I like my apps plain, so if Free Notes’ fancier looks get in the way of usability in any way, I’m kicking it out for Week Scheduler.