iCal is a beautiful little program. As a desktop application it is easy to use and reliable. As a tool to share your calendars with the world it is fabulous.

Here you’ll find a pile of iCal links covering iCal basics, tips, and ways to share your iCal vial online services and tools.

iCal Overviews:

• Apple has a nice list of iCal features with links:
• Here’s nice introduction to iCal. It’s a bit dated but still gives you a framework:
  Part1
  http://www.thinksecret.com/news/ical2.html
• Another Introduction from Low End Mac:
• To view a Quicktime slideshow overview: (56 MB)
• Atomic Learning has 4 free Quicktime tutorials:
• Apple’s iCal tips

Calendar Sharing:

Calendar sharing is not beyond most people. They just don’t know about it. It is quite easy to both subscribe to existing calendars and to create your own subscriptions.

If you follow a sports team, (I’m currently subscribed to the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament) want to add holidays to your calendar or subscribe to an organization’s calendar, you always have a current listing in your own iCal. You can even chart your bio-rythms in iCal

Adding your own calendar to a subscription service like this is also easy. I’ve even used the service with a friend to coordinate hiking dates. He and I both created a hiking calendar and subscribed to each other’s. That way it was very easy to schedule our outings.

• iCal World
• iCal Share
• Eventful
• Project 24

Online Calendars that work with iCal

• Event Sniper works directly with iCal subscriptions.
• CalendarHub Create multiple personal or group calendars. iCal subscription savy.
• HipCal currently imports and exports to .ics. iCal subscriptions are definitely on their radar.
• Kiko is more of an online PIM that can import .ics and Address Book vcards.
• Google Calendar There are rumors that Google Calendar will work with iCal as they use the same file format.

ebay and iCal

ebay will allow you to track your auction listing in iCal, giving you a reminder when your listing is about to end. For more see eBay Help

Blogging over iCal

• Blogging over iCal is an Applescript that will publish your iCal entries to a blogging system via XML-RPC.

iCal blogging with Wordpress

• With WP-iCal: WordPress iCal Event Plugin you can use WordPress to create both a calendar and a subscribable .ics file on your server.
• iCal Events is a plugin that displays events from an iCal source.
• Events Calendar lets you use Wordpress to manage future events as an online calendar. Display upcoming events in a dynamic calendar, on a listings page, or as a list in the sidebar.

iCal and Movable Type

• Lowdown Plugin for Movable Type will subscribe to published iCals.

Sync iCal to iPod, Palm or Cell Phones

Running Apple’s iSync will automatically synchronize iCal with the built in calendar in iPods. Used in conjunction with Palm Desktop it will sync your iCal and address book to your Palm PDA or compatible cell phones.. You do need either Bluetooth or a device specific USB cable to attach to your cell phone.

Integration with other OS X apps

*Using iCal to send a calendar event via Mail to other iCal users.
*(ZappTek provides hacks ) to help other email clients send iCal notifications.) There are several third party Applescripts and programs that expand on the built in features.
* iCal Events Widget
* [Syncing birthdays and other events with Address Book](http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/03/14/dates-to-ical-syncing-birthdays-anniversaries/(

iCal with other programs

There are several programs that integrate iCal to make scheduling easier. A great iCal to-do list utility. It lives in my Menu Bar: (http://www.kudurshian.net/highpriority/). Quicken (http://quicken.com) uses iCal, as does iBiz (http://www.iggsoftware.com/ibiz/index.html), Nuvvo(http://nuvvo.com/) and Daylite(http://www.marketcircle.com/).

iCal is also used in reverse by a number of programs. They create iCal calendars to automate their tasks. I use Audio Hijack (http://www.rogueamoeba.com/audiohijack/) to record New Dimensions at 11:00 p.m. on KUOW automatically for listening at a reasonable hour.

I do the same with SuperDuper(http://www.shirt-pocket.com/SuperDuper/) for automatic backups to an external hard drive.

A few tips I’ve found over the years:

Create line breaks in an iCal event

Press: option-return when you want a new line. This can be handy when you want to create short lists in an event—for example:

Meeting with Marketing:

* Bill Jones
* Rachael Johnson
* The Weird Intern

Change time/date field with the mouse

I found that if you activate (click into) a time or date entry field within the iCal info panel, and then hover over one of the individual date or time fields, you can change that number using the scroll wheel. You don’t even need a modifier key. This will work in Day, Week or Month views.

You can also use the + or - keys (with no modifier keys) to increment (+ key) or decrement (- key) a number while clicked into a date or time entry field in the iCal info panel.

Switch Views via the keyboard

Command-1 shows Day view. Command -2 shows the Week view and Command-3 shows Month view.

View Two or more consecutive days in Day view

You can view two days at a time in iCal by typing command-option-2, three days by typing command-option-3, and so on, up to seven days. I discovered this because I tried to assign command-option-1 to Window -) iCal in the Keyboard preference pane, and it wouldn’t let me.

Repeating the process causes the last day view to become the first in a new set of days!

Drag an Event from one day to another

You probably already know that you can drag event up or down in Day or Week view and that you can drag an Event from one day to another in Week or Month views.

Adjust visible hours on the fly in iCal

If you hold down the Option key while scrolling your mouse wheel up and down, it “zooms” your iCal screen in and out, adjusting the number of visible hours in the current view on the fly.

Change iCal icon to your own birthday

This is totally non-productive but fun. The iCal icon displays July 17, iCal’s introduction date. Ken X has made sets of iCal icons, in different colors, with all the year’s dates. By downloading an icon set you can use the Get Info command to change iCal’s icon to your own birthday or other significant date.

Manual iCal to iPod sync:

1. Plug in your iPod, being sure you’ve enabled iPod Firewire Disk support in iTunes so that it mounts on your desktop.
2. In iCal, choose the calendar you wish to export by clicking on it in the upper-left-hand pane.
3. Select File ) Export… and save the .ics file to the Calendars directory on your iPod drive.
4. Unmount and unplug your iPod.
5. Browse your iPod to Extras ) Calendars and, if all went to plan, you should be offered the choice of viewing a particular calendar (the one you exported) or All, if you exported more than one.

More

This is just the start! There are many uses of iCal that are more technical but everything here should be accessible to the average user.

Possibly related:

This entry was posted on Friday, March 24th, 2006 at 6:40 am and is filed under Resource Links, Web Services. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.