QuickSilver is easily one of the most powerful utilities available on the Mac. The amount of stuff you do with it is absoultely astounding. I don't know what I would do without it.

Thanks for nice tip, I always wondered if there was a quik way to add a todo ;)

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Cool! So how would you add the time of the event? Would it be: "dinner and a movie - 9/30/06 and 7 p.m."?

To get reminders all the time in iCal events try the shareware recommended here:
http://blog.smalldog.com/article/377/making-ical-always-use-default-to-an-alarm

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Hey cool, but I don't use iCal. I'm just not that busy! :)

I was wondering though, is there a shortcut way of adding contacts to Address Book, either with QS or something else?

Sorry, I know it's slightly off topic but I regard these two apps as similar.

Lee

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Is it just me, or isn't it faster/easier to enter the info directly into ical?

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macfan525:

The short answer is no. The long answer: Let's say you're in another app (reading your email in Gmail or Mail.app, for example) and you get an email from someone asking you to have dinner tomorrow night. Instead of launching iCal (or switching to iCal if it's already running), using the mouse to click on the date, entering a title and time, then switching back to your email...you could quickly add the event with a few keystrokes: cntrl+space to bring up the Quicksilver entry screen...type the name and date/time of the event...tab...type "ic"...press enter. Done. It may seem like a lot of steps, but in reality it's *very* quick. I've had people watch me enter things this way, and they didn't even realize what just happened, it was so fast. Believe me, this is MUCH faster than entering directly into iCal.

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Great functionality, but would love to see it strip the date and time out of the entry, once it's placed in iCal. Clutters things up a little to have the info in there twice...

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Actually, both of your posts are off for the syntax. Read the original docs, folks!

The correct syntax is

-- [!!]

where the optional exclamation marks indicate priority.

With this syntax, it creates an event on date (including any time you put in - "8pm" "tomorrow 8pm" and "tomorrow" all work as expected) with a title of properly.

(side note - Hawk Wings looks like a single dash because it's actually an em dash, caused by using a program like M$ Word with autocorrect on, which turns double dashes into long single dashes)

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I've just been having a play with this and it seems you can also enter things like:

"stuff to do - tomorrow"

and the event will get added for the next day. "yesterday" and the name of the day also work (in the latter case it adds it to the next occurence of the day specified). There are probably more shortcuts I haven't found yet.

I love Quicksilver.

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Stupid parser.

That should have read

date -- [!!] event

With this syntax, it creates an event "event" on date "date" (including any time you put in - "8pm" "tomorrow 8pm" and "tomorrow" all work as expected) with a title of "event" properly.

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Argh - it doesn't seem to like non-US date formats. i.e. in the rest of the world (well UK at least) 9/30/06 is 30/9/06.
Does this need localisation?

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The trick seems to be not using --. If I do "Foo--9/30 4pm" I get an event *now* called "9/30 4pm". If I do "Foo-9/30 4pm" I get an event on 9/30 at 4pm called Foo-9/30 4pm. "Foo 9/30 4pm" also works.

Note that the syntax is quite allowing. Try "dinner-next wed 7pm"

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Any ideas how to add an ending time to an event? I've tried "to" but that doesn't seem to do it.

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and this is supposed to be easy? c'mon!

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Brilliant! Working perfectly now with the double dash.

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Odd, but when I try entering the string "Dinner and a movie - 9/25 6pm" I end up with an event at 7pm in my calendar. I'm wondering if this is due to timezone/daylight saving issues? Any ideas? My timezone is currently set to CEST (Belgium) and iCal is also set to support timezones since I get meeting requests from other countries in other timezones.

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I just want to point out that AHM is precisely correct in what he says about syntax. Many people seem to be messing up by putting the date after the two dashes. It needs to go before. And yes, the syntax is quite allowing in terms of how you state the date. So to summarize:

[date, written in a variet of ways] -- [event or todo name]

*this will put your event where you want it and erase the date from the event title!
*the brackets, of course, do not have to be there
*put exclamation marks in front of the todo name to prioritize if you want
*it must be a double-dash that separates the date and the name if you want the event title format to be correct
*there do not have to be spaces on either side of the double dash
*i have also discovered that there cannot be single-dashes in the todo name; this causes the date information not to be entered into the todo. anyone else experienced this?

quicksilver is the greatest

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love this! is there a way to add a reminder? i tried just typing it in as part of the date/time (ie "reminder 1 hour before"), but it doesn't seem to register. this would be a great feature if anyone knows the syntax.

thanks,

George

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I don't know if this was changed in the recent update of the TODO and iCAL plugins, but if you format your initial string as: (date/time) -- (title), note the double "--", then the date/time is stripped out of the subject line, for example:

"tomorrow 4pm -- Have lunch with John Doe" (*minus the quotes)

will come up as:

"Have Lunch with John Doe"

Previously it would appear as:

"tomorrow 4pm -- Have lunch with John Doe"

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This reminds me of something that really annoys me in iCal. Namely that it ignores the system wide date format (i'm british) so i have to think to use mm/dd/yy as i'm used to dd/mm/yy

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