Kalendra is a powerful free multimedia calendar engine and personal organizer with the ability to load a variety of interesting photo and video theme packs.

Pros: Kalendra is a multimedia calendar software that enables a user to maintain a day to day calendar. In addition to being a basic calendar it allows the user to add photo and video theme packs. The photos or videos basically show up on the left pane, while the current week is displayed on the right pane. The feel is much like a paper diary and the interface is very good-looking and fairly easy to use. It has a number of attractive features: It allows address book integration (including importing address books from applications such as MS Outlook and also Skype / SkypeOut); it has a built-in alarm clock, and reminders are set up automatically for events including those that are recurring; it has instant messaging and emailing from within the software; it allows the basic view to be customized, and there is a slide show mode (to see upcoming events); there is a powerful searching capability; and finally it has support for popular social networks with the ability to import data from them (Flickr, YouTube, etc.).

Cons: The interface looks good, and because of the themes capability (pictures that can be uploaded and made part of the calendar) it can be made to look somewhat as you want it to look like. However, the trouble with the interface is that sometimes it simply doesn’t work. There are random errors and bugs that show up from time to time. For example, sometimes a certain button (like add a task) freezes. At other times the software simply gets stuck, or closes down. All in all, it’s a terrible experience. This is a pity because the interface is really attractive looking and functions / buttons are placed at convenient locations.

Overall: 1 star. The software promises a lot but delivers very little. It is intended to be a basic calendar application, and most of the time it works fairly well. But it has random errors and bugs which make it frustrating to use. It doesn’t seem likely that anyone would go beyond the evaluation phase.