Calendar Magic provides comprehensive coverage of 23 different calendar systems, including full-year and month calendar generation, date conversions, and month-by-month, side-by-side calendar comparisons. It also covers observed days for around 230 different countries, and Christian, Orthodox, Buddhist, Chinese, Hebrew, Hindu, Islamic, Baha'i, and Sikh festivals.
Calendar Magic is an easy-to-use program that is entertaining, informative, educational, and of equal applicability in the home and in the office.
Here are some key features of "Calendar Magic":
- Full year and individual month Gregorian, Afghan, Armenian, Baha'i, Bangla, Chinese, Coptic, Egyptian, Ethiopic, French Revolutionary, Hebrew, Hindu Lunisolar (3 variants), Hindu Solar, Indian National, Islamic Civil, Julian, Revised Julian, Parsi Fasli, Parsi Kadmi, Parsi Shenshai, Persian (2 variants), Sikh Nanakshahi and Vietnamese calendars. A user option is provided to choose between displaying/printing calendars showing each week starting on a Monday (in line with the ISO 8601 international standard), on a Sunday for North American users, or on a Saturday for Middle East users.
- Alternative Gregorian "planning calendars".
- A month-by-month, side-by-side comparison of any two of the 23 calendar systems listed above. The display remains synchronised as you change day, month and year values in either calendar system being viewed. Again, users may choose between displaying each month with weeks starting on a Saturday, Sunday or Monday.
- Date conversions among the 23 calendar systems listed above, plus conversions to Balinese Pawukon, Thai solar, old Hindu Solar, old Hindu Lunisolar and Mayan date formats. Julian day value, day of week and day of year information is also displayed. For Gregorian dates, many other facts are displayed, such as modified Julian day value, Lilian day value and Rata Die day value, and year related information including Roman numeral form, Dominical Letter(s), Dionysian Period, Julian Period, Golden Number, Solar Number, Roman Indiction and Epact. Various special days are also recognised (e.g. Halloween), as are modern Olympic years, Commonwealth Games years, European Athletics Championship years, and World Athletic Championship years.
- Lists of Western Christian festivals, Eastern Orthodox festivals, Hebrew festivals and Islamic festivals for any (Gregorian) year. In addition, Hindu festivals may be listed for any year in the range 2000 to 2043, Baha'i festivals from 1845 onwards, Buddhist and Chinese festivals from 1645 to 3000, and Sikh Nanakshahi festivals from 1999 onwards.
- "Observed Days" for any year from 1990 for over 230 countries and dependencies worldwide.
- "Date Detective" command button to tabulate the weekday on which a specified Gregorian date d/m occurs for each of the years in the specified range y1 to y2.
- "In Which Months?" command button to list, for a given year, the months in which a specified day of the month falls on a specified weekday.
- The ability to create, display, update and delete reminders for events (birthdays, anniversaries, meetings etc.) for "this year", "next year" or "every year". When Calendar Magic is started up, both visual and audible warnings are given for "imminent" events (those occurring within the next seven days) for which reminders have been set. In addition, a calendar for any month, in this year or next year, may be displayed with day numbers highlighted in red for those days in the month for which reminders have been set. Left-clicking on any "red day" will cause the reminder(s) set for that day to be listed.
- Out-of-date reminders are also automatically purged by Calendar Magic and appended to a text file, purged.dat, for later reference, if needed.
- A multi-sheet "Quick Notes" facility for holding miscellaneous plain text items.
- An "alarm clock" facility for defining an alarm for a given time on a given date. A user may specify the duration of the alarm which may be repeated, after a specified "quiet" time, up to five more times.
- "This is your life" information including day-of-the-week on which you were born, number of days you have lived, your Zodiac sign, some biorhythm data, and the day-of-the-week on which your next birthday falls. Your "Chinese age" and your date of birth in many other calendar systems are also displayed.
- Continuously updated display of date, time and Julian day.
- Number of days between any two dates in the Gregorian calendar (and number of working days).
- Calculation of the date n days, weeks, months or years before or after a specified Gregorian date, where n is a whole number.
- An analysis of the Gregorian 400-year cycle, after which the Gregorian calendar repeats itself.
- Special calendars for 1582 (the year when the Gregorian calendar began) and 1752 (the year when Great Britain and its colonies changed to the Gregorian calendar), with related information.
- Dates and times of equinoxes, solstices and Moon phases for any year from 1582 to 3000.
- Solar and lunar eclipse data for any year up to 3000.
- Sunrise and sunset information for any date up to the end of 2200 for 8000 locations across the world.
- Moonrise and moonset information for any date up to the end of 2200 for these 8000 locations across the world.
- "Great circle" distances between any two of these 8000 locations across the world.
- Current local time and date in any of these 8000 locations, plus interpretation of time zone abbreviations.
- A Unit Converter for converting among 1704 units of measurement in 82 different categories including length, area, volume, mass, temperature, time, velocity, energy, power, pressure, computer storage etc.
- A Time Calculator for performing simple arithmetic on times.
- A Geometry Calculator for evaluating key attributes (area, perimeter, volume, surface area etc.) of various 2D and 3D geometric objects.
- A Factor Calculator for factorising numbers with up to 60 digits and for evaluating the HCFs and LCMs of lists of numbers.
- A stack based Scientific Calculator with a visible stack.
- An Expression Calculator for calculating the values of arithmetic expressions entered in normal (infix) form.
- A Pregnancy Calculator for calculating the due date of a pregnancy and other pregnancy related dates.
- Colour customisation of screen backgrounds, non-button text and button backgrounds.
- Support for printing any output displayed, and/or copying it to another program via the Windows clip-board using the usual Ctrl+A , Ctrl+C, Ctrl+P, Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V keyboard commands.
Requirements: Windows 95/98/Me/NT/2000/XP
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Calendar Magic 17.0 Now Available
Enhancements and improvements in V17.0 are listed below.
At the suggestion of a user, you may now specify the music file to be played when a set alarm goes off. A new combo box on the Alarm Clock form (Time > Alarm Clock) lists the names of all cda, mp3, m4a, m4p, ogg, wav and wma files in the folder in which Calendar Magic is installed, so that you may choose any favourite music file you have copied to this folder. The file name chosen is “sticky”.
To play a music file, other than a wav file, Calendar Magic uses the music player software on your PC associated with the file extension.
Encouraged by a Balinese user, implemented the Balinese Saka lunisolar calendar, widely used throughout the island of Bali. This calendar may now be selected in Year Calendars, Month Calendars, Dual Calendars and Calendar Comparison. Conversion to and from Balinese Saka calendar dates has also been implemented.
Implemented the Balinese Pawukon calendar in Year Calendars. For each day in any chosen Gregorian year, the first half of the output shows the Pawukon Wuku (week) name followed by the values of the day names in the 10 simultaneous Pawukon cycles. The second half of the output lists, day by day, the values of Ingkel, Parerasan , Panca Suda, Lintang and Ekajala Rasi.
Note that printing a Balinese Pawukon calendar should be done in landscape mode and that the output is lengthy – more than 800 lines.
The values of Wuku, Ingkel, Ingkel Jejepan, Watek, Rakam, Parerasan , Panca Suda, Dewa, Wayang, Taru, Manuk, Sato, Lintang and Ekajala Rasi also now appear in Date Conversions output.
Created a new category of religious festivals for listing the dates of Balinese Hindu festivals and holy days in any (Gregorian) year. Festivals based on both the Balinese Pawukon and Saka calendars are included.
At the request of a user, added an Ovulation Calculator (Utilities > Ovulation Calculator) for predicting the dates of maximum fertility days. Once calculated, the dates may be printed or added to your set reminders via an “Add to My Reminders” command button.
Added civil, nautical and astronomical twilight time information to the output from Sun and Moon Data (Utilities > Sun and Moon Data).
If you have a multi-line mathematical expression already prepared using a text editor or word processor, you can now copy and paste it into the Expression Calculator and then press the Recalc All button to have the various lines processed. Of course, any such mathematical expression must conform to the syntactic rules of the Expression Calculator. An added bonus is that, if you use the Ctrl+V keyboard key combination to paste the expression, decimal points will be automatically converted into commas, or vice-versa, depending on your “Decimal symbol” Windows setting.
In the Geometry Calculator, added the aspect ratio 16:10 when calculating the attributes of television screens.
At the suggestion of a user, “This is Your Life” output now includes a person’s age in years, months and days according to the Islamic calendar. This is important in Islam where the commencement of various religious duties is based on a young person’s Islamic calendar age. The calculation is performed using the variant of the Islamic arithmetical calendar chosen by the user (Options > Calendar).
Added a “Print in Alphabetical Order” button to the Observed Days and Religious Festivals forms. Also made some improvements to these forms.
Added ordinal date format to the output from Date Conversions.
Added more locations on Tenerife to Calendar Magic’s world-wide database. Fixed a few bugs in the data for the Canary Islands.
When a Chinese or Vietnamese calendar is selected in Month Calendars or Calendar Comparison, the creature associated with the year (pig, rat, ox etc.) is now displayed.
Updated Commonwealth Games data.
Improved the layout of the Dual Calendars, Pregnancy Calculator and Regnal Dates Conversion forms. Dual calendars may now be printed on a single A4 page, provided that a sufficiently small font is used.
Corrected the spelling of the transliterated Islamic day name Yaum al-khamis.
Changed the Hebrew month name “Marcheshvan” to “Cheshvan”.
Calendar Magic 16.7 Released
Enhancements and improvements in V16.7 include:
Radically changed the user interface by replacing the numerous command buttons on the main screen by a menu bar. Advantages of so doing include the ease with which new functionality can now be provided, without adding more and more command buttons, and a reduced “footprint” for the main screen.
The red or orange rectangle, which used to surround the Show Reminders button to indicate an imminent reminder, has been replaced by a red or orange diamond shape in the top right-hand corner of the main screen output text-box. Red indicates the existence of a set reminder for the current date and orange the existence of a set reminder less than 1 week away. You can get rid of the red or orange diamond by left-clicking it.
At the request of several users, there is now a checkbox in Calendar options (Options > Calendar) for turning off the display of the Julian Day value on the main screen.
Added a Save menu item (File > Save) to the menu bar for saving main screen output to a text file. It uses the standard Windows dialogue for saving to a file.
Added a “Tip of the Day” menu item (Help > Tip of the Day) for displaying helpful hints for new users. A check box is provided for turning on and off the display of a “tip of the day” when Calendar Magic is started.
Added an “About My Location” menu item (Help > About My Location) for consolidating and displaying various facts and figures about a user’s chosen location.
“Before and After” (Dates > Before and After) now supports the calculation of the date y years m months w weeks d days before or after a given date. This helps to answer questions such as the one posed by a keen user – if Uncle Fred died on March 22, 2007 at age 92 years, 10 months and 27 days, when was he born?
Note that this is not always a precisely defined mathematical problem since months in the Gregorian calendar vary in length.
In “Before and After”, in order to provide consistent results, working backwards is done in the order days, weeks, months and years, while working forwards is done in the order years, months, weeks and days. A warning message is also issued if a resulting date does not exist, for example 1 year after Feb. 29, 2000.
In the BAC Calculator (Utilities > BAC Calculator) , replaced the mean values for the Widmark factor r (0.68 for men and 0.55 for women) by computing r from formulas due to Seidl et al, namely:
where W is the person’s weight in kilograms and H the person’s height in centimetres. Height and height unit are now “sticky” values.
To support the conversion of Julian Day values to dates in the various supported calendar systems, added a “Julian Day” entry to the drop-down list of calendars on the Date Conversions form.
Redesigned “In Which Months?” (Dates > In Which Months?) to cover a range of years rather than a single year. The drop-down list of day names is also now ordered starting from the week start day selected in Calendar options (Options > Calendar). For example, if your preferred week start day is Saturday, the drop-down list of day names will be in the order Saturday, Sunday, Monday, … Friday.
Redesigned “Days between Dates” (Dates > Days between Dates).
Redesigned the “Date Detective” (Dates > Date Detective). Also fixed a minor February 29 related bug which was causing an erroneous error message.
Redesigned the Edit Reminders form to reduce the amount of screen “real estate” occupied.
Improved the appearance of listed reminders by removing superfluous commas from the displayed information.
Removed Guadeloupe and Martinique from Calendar Magic’s list of countries and added the French Antilles, which include not only Guadeloupe and Martinique but also several other islands. Added a number of other towns in the French Antilles to Calendar Magic’s worldwide locations database. In all cases, the name of the town is followed, in parentheses, by the name of the island on which it is located. Adopted the same convention for locations in various island groups in
other parts of the world.
Note that all references to Guadeloupe and Martinique have been removed from the default versions of the files mycountry.dat and mycities.dat so that, if you have created personalised versions of these files, you may need to make corresponding updates.
Restructured and updated the Help file. Created separate, short help files for menu bar items, special keyboard key combinations and version history. All three are available from the Help menu drop-down list of items.
Added the date in 2007 of the Royal Ploughing Ceremony in Thailand.
Fixed a bug causing the loading of the wrong colour scheme for a few forms.