General questions about DateLens:

• What is DateLens?
• How is it different than other products?
• What if I want to use the built-in calendar sometimes?

Questions about using DateLens:

• Why does the body of my appointment sometimes get duplicated?
• Why does DateLens sometimes exit so I have to restart it?

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General questions about DateLens:

• What is DateLens?
  DateLens is a calendar program for Pocket PC that is an alternative to the calendar program built in to those devices. It is designed to be easy to navigate with the goal of better supporting planning and analysis tasks where you often have to look at large stretches of time and go back and forth between different days.
   
• How is it different than other products?
   
DateLens is novel in the following ways:
• It uses animated fisheye views to show details in context. When you tap on a day, it smoothly gets bigger, and the other days get smaller in the periphery. In this way, you can always see where you are, and it is easy to navigate to other days.
• It gives users extensive control over how screen space is used. By clicking on the checkboxes in the periphery of the display, you can make individual months larger or smaller. Similarly, you can focus on weekdays or on weekends - all without losing context.
   
• What if I want to use the built-in calendar sometimes?
  DateLens loads and stores all appointments using the standard Pocket PC calendar database.  This means that you can go back and forth between DateLens and the Microsoft calendar program (or any other one) with no risk of losing data.  When you synchronize your Pocket PC with your desktop using Microsoft ActiveSync, all of your DateLens appointments will be synchronized with Outlook just as if you had used the built-in calendar program.  In fact, DateLens even knows when the calendar database program is changed by another program, so if you sync while DateLens is running, or modify the calendar using the built-in calendar program, DateLens will immediately be updated to reflect the changes.

Questions about using DateLens:

• Why does the body of my appointment sometimes get duplicated?
  This is a result of a known bug in the Microsoft calendar database that DateLens uses.  Fortunately, this problem only shows up in unusual circumstances, so you probably won't run into it.  Specifically, if you change body of a recurring appointment in DateLens on the Pocket PC, and then synchronize with Outlook using ActiveSync, and then modify the appointment, and then synchronize again - then the body of the appointment on the Pocket PC will be duplicated.
   
• Why does DateLens sometimes exit so I have to restart it?
  Pocket PC automatically manages which programs are running.  If you start to run out of memory, then some programs will be automatically exited and have to be restarted.  No data will be lost, but in this case, you do have to wait a few seconds while DateLens restarts.