iCal is out

[Craig R. Arko]

iCal (http://www.apple.com/ical/) is available for download. 10.2 required; and a .Mac account or a WebDAV capable web server for sharing.

I'll give it a whirl but I think Now Up-to-Date will still meet my needs better.

[DSHwrd]

iCal is pretty! I like it a lot... except...


Why can't I change the font size? Using month view is virtually useless because you can't 'read' any of the events they're so small (I'm in a 1240x960 resolution though). Week view would be better if I could make the 'All Day' events section of the calendar bigger, but alas, I can find no way to do so. :(

Besides those two things, I like it! Maybe it'll be fixed in 1.0.1 ?

Here's hoping,
- Daniel

[macmath]

I also would have liked control over the font and the size of the font. In addition, I would like control over what is printed in the printed version [ie, previous month, and next month take of space that could have been used to help more events fit on the printed version of the'month-at-a-time' calendar (handy for the refrigerator)].

While it is not iCal's original purpose to be this kind of a calendar, it would be cool (although not necessary) to allow a background underneath the calendar. Along this same vein, it would be cool if you could put a small picture in each day of a monthly calendar (a birthday cake, a small photo of the birthday person, anniversary couple). Again, this is a different kind of calendar (and one can buy ones that do this).

[houchin]

You know, I really wanted to like iCal. I really did. But...

I've spent a couple hours this morning transferring my Entourage calendar to iCal. I wanted to stop using Entourage because I only use it for calendaring, and I think it and the Office Notifications applications are a bit on the slow side.

I was hoping that iCal would be reasonably fast on my TiBook 550. It's even slower than Entourage.

When it transferred all my events, it got rid of all of the category information, so I had to go through everything and move them to new "calendars" in iCal. That took a good 30 minutes. It also lost the "location" information from Entourage, so I had to sit there with Entourage open to manually transfer that information. It also lost all of the notification information, so I had to do that manually too.

Anyway, all that's done now, so it's just time to use it. So I hid iCal and waited for my first alarm dialog box. Well, it comes, and iCal slowly brings the window forward. First comes the dialog, then a few seconds later the icon of the shaking alarm clock, and then a few seconds later the entire iCal app comes forward. This is a real pain, as it makes those alarms very intrusive.

I'll give it a week, but I'm not at all impressed right now. They need to address the speed issues ASAP.

[houchin]

Man, two more strikes against iCal ...

If iCal is not running, you don't get alarm notifications, and when you eventually do start it running, you don't get notice that you missed any alarms. This is not good. I realize that iCal should just be made a login item, but at times I've had to quit apps (like I had to do last night), and iCal never got restarted.

Also, maybe this was just my mistaken perception of the calendar sharing, but I had the impression that calendar sharing made web pages that could be viewed by anyone. Nope, it just publishes the calendar as an .ics file, so only other iCal viewers can see it. I was hoping to have a published calendar that windows users could view (so I can stop maintaining a Lotus Notes calendar, since the Notes client for Mac OS X isn't very good ...). Nope.

[Thundarr]

I am with you Craig. Now Up-To-Date is far superior. It is the only calender program that I know allows for individual to-do lists tied to each day. For a scientist who likes to plan his weekly experiments in advance, this is an essential feature. If iCal could incorporate that feature and few others along the lines of modifying appearance, I might switch, especially because it could be integrated with Address Book and Mail. As it is now, I stay with Now Up-To-Date. Apple, keep working on iCal though. It has promise.

[Phil St. Romain]

Thundarr, what I've done about that daily to-do list on iCal is put it as the top entry of the day. Double-clicking on the entry tab opens a window which enables a detailed account of that entry, and that's where I list my items. The to-do list on the outer window is sort of my "ongoing/whenever" list. That works for me, so far.

[Thundarr]

That could sort of work for me Phil. I will try it out. One of things I do like about Now Up-To-Date is that the to-do lists have three modes of checking off: an empty box signifying nothing has been started, a slash in the box signifying a task has been started and a check indicating a task has been finished. The check box system is quite important to how I function with my to-do lists and is very close to how I used to do them on paper. Having things listed in the event loses the check box capability. I suppose I could use a color coding instead. Let me try that out. Thanks for the suggestion.

[houchin]

Originally posted by houchin
If iCal is not running, you don't get alarm notifications.

Ok, it appears now that this is not correct. I got fed up with the slowness of iCal this morning and went back to Entourage. iCal was not running, but at the time I had previously set an alarm, and application called iCal Helper was started which displayed the alarm dialog box.

Unfortunately, I can't figure out what application started iCal helper, and I didn't get notificatations of items that happened while my system was sleeping.

[mervTormel]

calendars for iCal...

http://www.apple.com/ical/library/