Create A Calendar (1987) Create A Calendar was Epyx’s entry into home and school productivity software, offering a surprisingly robust toolset for designing personalized calendars on the Apple II. Users could build calendars from scratch or begin with one of several “master calendars” that came preloaded with holidays, historical events, or religious observances. These templates could populate the year automatically with important dates—ranging from federal holidays and equinoxes to Hanukkah and Grandparents’ Day. The software supported daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly views, with each day capable of holding several lines of text and—uniquely for the time—an associated graphic. Side B of the program disk contained 81 graphics, and users could also pull images from Epyx’s Graphics Scrapbook disks or other Print Shop-compatible libraries (with mixed results). Visuals weren’t just decorative—they helped highlight key events at a glance, especially in printouts. Power features included flexible event repetition (e.g. “every third Friday”) and the ability to create a variety of calendar formats for hard copy output, such as single-page year views or scrolling banners. While the interface required patience—particularly on single-disk systems—the calendar-building workflow was thoughtfully designed and allowed for a surprising amount of customization. Though not without its quirks (such as typos in file references or minor documentation errors), Create A Calendar offered a charming, educational way for users to plan their year—making it a popular addition to home bulletin boards and classroom walls alike.

In today’s over-programmed world, it seems that the moment you try to print your daily, weekly, or monthly calendar, it’s already out of date with new events and commitments.  While there’s something charming about the idea of a printed calendar, we don’t think the market appetite for this is strong enough to revive it.  This title will simply stay in the Epyx archives.