Example calendar
Most hospitals have many events for many groups of clinicians througout the year. Each department posts its diary on various notice boards, and mails copies to the clinicians' pigeon holes. DatePak greatly eases the job of making more clinicians aware of these events. This articles shows how easy it is to create a DatePak diary.
The program comes as a simple PC application. Create a new file and start entering events straight away.
Screenshot of event details on a PC
Much like the diary application on handheld computers, each event has extra information for repeating occurences, or notes about the event. For the latter feature, you can include links to a department's local web site. This feature would allow the department to create and distribute its diary as soon as the dates are finalised, while posting more details on the web site as they arrive.
Screenshots of the "Notes" section on a PC, which can refer to websites
Each event can also have a category. Categories are important as they allow the clinician to focus on the events of most interest, without getting lost in the diversity of the hospital's educational offerings. When all the events are created, they look like this:
Screenshot of the full events list on a PC
DatePak's options for the diary are wonderfully detailed, and include the ability to assign a custom icon:
Screenshot of Calendar Properties on a PC, which can assign a custom icon
Once complete, choose Build Calendar Package from the File menu, and DatePak will produce two files, one for Palm-compatible machines, and another for Pocket PCs. These are ready for distribution to any Palm-compatible or Pocket PC handheld computer. They runs by themselves, with no need for any other file or program.
Here is what the files look like after synchronising with a handheld computer:
Screenshot of icon in Programs list on a Pocket PC handheld computer
Screenshot of icon in Applications list on a Palm-compatible handheld computer
Tapping the icon leads to this screen:
Screenshot of starting dialog of program on a Pocket PC handheld computer
Screenshot of starting dialog of application on a Palm-compatible handheld computer
And the events screen looks like this:
Screenshot of events on a Pocket PC handheld computer
Screenshot of events on a Palm-compatible handheld computer
Note how the events are grouped by category. Within the "Young Fellows Academic Meeting" category, individual events looks like this:
Screenshot of "Young Fellows Academic Meeting" category of events on a Pocket PC handheld computer
Screenshot of "Young Fellows Academic Meeting" category of events on a Palm-compatible handheld computer
Perhaps the cleverest function of the program is the Add to Date & Adress Book button. It can add a category of events to the main Palm diary or Pocket PC calendar. In other words, the events can either be viewed through the teaching application, or, if the user chooses, through the main diary. Creating this file took me about half an hour of copying and pasting from an existing Word file. That is the same time it would have taken me to copy and paste the events into my Palm Desktop's diary. However because I went through the DatePak route, anyone who gets this file will be able to get all of this information into their diary with just three taps.
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