Diacarta for iPhone

Diacarta is a visual calendar planner from Squnch that offers a fun way to plan out your day. The $2 app for the iPhone and iPod touch promises a “mental picture of your day,” using icons to represent your assorted to-dos.

Launching Diacarta produces a fun little noise as the app opens to the current day. Open the app in the morning, and you’ll see the A.M. portion of your day; likewise, in the afternoon, the app shows p.m. events. You can easily change the day by sliding you finger across the screen or tapping the calendar button on the bottom of the screen, which takes you to Diacarta’s full month calendar. From the calendar, you can tap the arrows to go forward or back in months.

Adding events to your day is fairly easy. Tap the plus button to add one of the many icons supplied by the app. There are more than 50 icons to choose from. But if one doesn’t fit for your task of choice, you can use the blank bubble and type in whatever the task may be.

You then drag the icon related to the planned activity to the time of day you want to schedule it. I attended a baby shower from 1:30 to 3:30 p.m., so I selected a baby icon and placed it on the clock. I double-tapped on the icon to add information, such as name, location, start and end time, and any other details I wanted to include. You can make any changes to the event on this screen, including changing the time. You also can easily move the icon to a different time on the virtual clock. You can schedule things out days, months, or even years in advance.

If you want to check an item off your daily list, you have the option to mark the event with a star once you’ve completed that task.

If a task doesn’t need or have a specific time, but you want to be reminded about it, you can have the icon on the screen to the side of the clock, where it isn’t connected to a particular time. Say I want to remember to call my mom; I can have the phone icon on the screen with details of why I need to call her.

If you schedule overlapping events, you will get a pop-up message from the app warning you that you’re scheduling multiple events at the same time. It’s a handy way to avoid overbooking yourself.

Diacarta offers a nice way to see your day laid out. I found it particularly helpful that the clock in the center of the screen shows the actual time, which makes it even easier to see how long you have until a scheduled event.

While Diacarta is a fun and visual way to view your day, I personally plan to stick with my native iPhone calendar. I work better with list-style entries, and I found updating Diacarta a little more time-consuming than simply tapping an entry into the built-in Calendar app. For someone who is a visual person, though, this scheduling app will be the perfect fit.

[Ann Chihak Poff writes a health and fitness blog, Go Fit Girl.]