Everybody and her grandmother seems to offer software to organize your life, but so far no knockout program has claimed the prize. Berkeley Systems, undisputed champion of the screen-saver market, now steps in with Expresso, a calendar and address-book program. Can Expresso go all 15 rounds against your disorganized life? That depends on how complex your life is.
Expresso’s main claim to fame is that it puts a fullscreen calendar on your Mac’s desktop, just like the paper blotter calendars that sit on top of real desks. A Flashback feature toggles the application on and off from an icon in the menu bar. Click on the icon once to put up a static version of your calendar as a desktop pattern; click again to make the calendar an active window.
Since you’ll be looking at your calendar a lot, you’ll want to like what you see. Berkeley Systems offers 20 calendar designs in the basic Expresso package, with more in the works. (In November the company brought out a version with six Star Trek “looks.”) Each look has its own colors, calendar design, and TrueType font, and some include basic animations that can run in the background at idle times. Practically speaking, many of the designs are difficult to read day in and day out; I ended up switching to the most basic pattern.
The easy-to-use calendar has a straightforward interface and simple text entry. It provides banners; a basic alarm; support for repeating events; a to-do list; and daily, weekly, and monthly views. Information from Expresso prints out nicely, in daily, weekly, and monthly layouts based on the current look. You can scale layouts to fit most Day Runner-style organizers. Expresso lets you assign priorities to to-do items, and you can archive your lists for later reference.
Expresso’s weakest point is its address book. The program uses a rotary-card-file metaphor for displaying contact data. The cards include the essential fields, but you can’t customize fields or categories or other types of information you might want to show^ The space on the card limits the amount of information you can enter, so contacts having multiple addresses require multiple cards.
Furthermore, to be useful, contact data should be easily and quickly accessible from the calendar. Expresso claims to support drag-and-drop linking between the address book and the calendar and to-do list, but links between the two components are weak. For instance, if you drag “12:30 lunch date with Sarah” from the calendar to your address book, that exact text drops into a single address-book entry field, adding a rather garbled entry to your contact list. Expresso won’t crossreference Sarah with any of the Sarahs in your address book so you can remember which one you’re supposed to see and check her phone number. Expresso can link only one to-do item or person to a calendar entry, making it useful for only the most rudimentary tasks.
Also, the full-screen calendar view poses a problem: clicking on the calendar window sends all the other Expresso windows behind it, making it impossible to drag information from the calendar to your address book or to-do list.
The Last Word
I can’t recommend Expresso to anyone who needs a full-featured information manager. Furthermore, 2MB of RAM is a lot to demand for a simple application that most users will want to run in the background. But Berkeley Systems’ just-the-basics approach might be just fine for people who don’t need the feature set of other calendar programs and can get by with a bare-bones contact manager — especially if they go for Expresso’s graphics.
Hawn, Matthew. (April 1995). Expresso 1.0. Macworld. (pg. 73).
Berkeley Systems
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2020-09-13 / 
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Expresso.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
