Today's The Day from Stellarmetrics is the first in several Today screen plug-ins, featuring the ability to cycle through either the included .jpg images or user-defined .gif images, in effect creating a slide-show of images in place of the default Today banner on the Today screen.

The application comes as an .exe self-executable and automatically starts an Install Wizard with dialogue boxes to guide the user through the installation. Once installed, the user accesses Today's The Day's settings through Settings/Today. Under Today Settings, the TTD banner, like the other items on the Today Screen, can be moved either up or down. Upon highlighting Today's The Day and tapping Options, the TTD control panel is displayed. The user can select which image file to use (only .jpg and .gif files can be used), and whether to display the day and/ or the date. Next are controls for the frequency of image updates: Every five minutes, Every hour, and Everyday. On the bottom is a selector for the number of images in a file.

Although the application comes with its own TTD .jpg image file with a different banner for each day of the week, the application allows the user to be creative, using their own picture files with any number of images in either .jpg or .gif formats. The file has to be named today*.gif or today*.jpg, and should be placed into My Documents. As for the picture file, all banners need to be placed vertically one on top of the other, with a recommended width of 240 pixels and of uniform height, so the application can recognize where one banner ends and where the next begins. Depending on the number of banners stacked in the image file, the user would then configure the Images Per File selector accordingly.

Despite not having any other function other than cycling through banner images on the Today screen, Today's the Day allows simple customization of one's Pocket PC and only claims 964B of RAM. Relative to other Today screen plug-ins such as Dashboard by Snoopsoft, Today's the Day is a free download, but seems overpriced at the encouraged registration fee of $5. For a suggested registration fee of $10, Dashboard replaces the entire Today Screen, showing actual appointments and tasks, while cycling through full-size images in the background. In addition, there are separate views for displaying the user's Inbox, a program launcher, and a custom screen called My Dashboard, which was given full functionality only recently with the program's newest revision.

With such a compelling alternative, I would be hard-pressed to recommend Today's the Day over Snoopsoft's Dashboard, as the latter retains and improves upon the former's capabilities while adding its own functionality and customization options. I'm not implying that TTD isn't a decent application on its own, but it seems rather lacking next to other developers' offerings. For what it does do however, TTD doesn't fail to deliver.