Spotlife for Mac

Spotlife for Mac overlays a calendar on top of your desktop wallpaper so that all your appointments and reminders are always visible. When used with Mac OS X's ability to show the desktop by spreading your fingers on the trackpad, this premium app truly delivers an at-a-glance calendar experience. It's compatible with popular calendar services and comes with extensive customization options.

After a straightforward installation, Spotlife for Mac walks you through a quick tutorial on how to use its key features. The first thing you'll notice about the new calendar this app adds to your desktop is that it's completely locked down -- you cannot interact with it directly. However, once activated via a Menu Bar option or with a user-assigned shortcut key, the calendar will "jump out" of its place and take the center stage, allowing you to browse, but not edit it. This is really the only drawback of the app, as you can only view and not edit the calendar. When choosing how you want to view your calendar, you can select one of the four available options: Agenda, Day, Week, or Month. In terms of performance, Spotlife for Mac is stable and consumes a moderate amount of memory -- approximately 100MB of RAM.

If you use a calendar on a daily basis and want a quicker way to check it, Spotlife for Mac has a lot to offer. While it does come with a price tag, the pleasant experience, coupled with the sheer number of customization options it gives you, make it an appealing choice for novice and power users, alike.

Editors' note: This is a review of the trial version of Spotlife for Mac 1.0.8.

• Weather forecast in the Day, Week, and Month views
• Menu bar icon shows current date
• Blurred, translucent background styles for Desktop Calendar
• Automatically uses calendar accounts set up in OS X
• Supports On My Mac, iCloud, Exchange, Yahoo, Google, CalDAV, etc.
• Switch between Agenda, Day, Week, and Month views directly from menu bar
• View tasks as banners that stretch to due date or just on due date
• Interface improvements to match style of Yosemite
• Color & monochrome weather display styles
• More…