Seize The Day

The Heaven & Earth crew teamed up again, this time to create something both beautiful and functional: an elegant calendar program with lots of thoughtful touches, complete with space for appointments, contacts and personal musings as well as a wealth of historical data and daily quotes.

To top it all off, every month was accompanied by a different "Living World": A calendar picture of a magical far-off land that lived and breathed in real time. Waterfalls splashed, clouds moved across the sky, the sun rose and set in time with your computer's clock, shadows edging their way across the land. Some days were rainy, some days were sunny. Some nights you could see ghosts or fairies flitting through the woods. It was a truly amazing accomplishment, both artistically and technically, thanks in great part to Mark Ferrari's incredible artwork and careful planning.

New Version

To this day, the majority of fan mail I receive is for Seize The Day. I'm now working on a new version of the Living Worlds for iOS and Android, to celebrate Seize The Day's 25th anniversary!

Original Version

Freda McGowan Byers has diligently put together a page with the original installers, plus instructions for getting them to work on modern computers.

Other Versions

Joe Huckaby has made an impressive web-based version of the Living Worlds, using JavaScript and HTML5. If you're curious, he's written up a page on how he did it as well as a Q & A with Mark Ferrari.

Someone has turned Joe's versions into lovely animated GIFs.

Feedback

"Life changes. Seize the Day is gone, I must accept that and move on. You are right, no doubt, that the most fan mail you receive concerns this Calendar app from 1994. Ditto Mark Ferrari. And I am yet another fan; there has never been another like it, a day planner with emotional impact! Allow me this, then: That my real attachment to it also has to do with a missing chunk of my life: From 1996, until last year, I served just over 10 years in prison for a crime I did not commit... until modern science, forensics, DNA and a damn good lawyer finally freed me. Prison is an alternate world... like being in stasis. And among the things I missed were real coffee, the lick of my dog Pixi, and Seize The Day on my old Tandy. It may not have the bells & whistles of Outlook or such, but it had soul."

-- Tom Darby

"It is rare to find a piece of software that is soothing to even think about, especially when it's something as potentially stressful as a calendar."

-- Margaret Star