Filed under: Software, Cool tools, How-tos, Productivity, Tips and tricks
How To: Add a new iCal event from Quicksilver
A while ago we covered Quicksilver plugins for Gmail and Google Calendar, allowing you to send an email or create a new event (respectively) right from within Quicksilver's interface. If you aren't a Google Calendar user though, Quicksilver also offers the same kind of plugin for iCal. Somehow I lost this in my bloggable bookmarks, but last month Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings broke down the syntax for adding an event to iCal with this plugin, and it's really pretty simple. When entering text, the event is written like so:
- name of event - date and time
- name of todo - date and time
- !!! name of todo - date and time (exclamation points add priority. Two for 'important,' three for 'where's the panic button?!')
Here's an example of how to make this work in Quicksilver if you're a little confused. Obviously, you need to install the iCal plugin if you don't have it, and you can get it from QS's plugin preference pane. Here's how this breaks down, and I have the steps pictured above:
- Invoke QS, press period to get a text entry pane, and type something like: "dinner and a movie - 9/30/06 6:00 pm" (sans quotes)
- Tab over to the second pane where you must specify you want to turn this text into an iCal event. I type 'ic' to find an iCal event, and 'ict' for a todo, but as always with QS, YMMV
- Tab over once more to have your choice of calendars, and press the right arrow key to get a drop down list of all your calendars, or simply start typing to find one of their names. Fortunately, since you've already chosen a specific action in the middle pane, only your calendars are listed in the third pane
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
ambimb said 12:18PM on 9-23-2006
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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Travis Bell said 12:13PM on 9-23-2006
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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Lee Webb said 12:20PM on 9-23-2006
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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macfan525 said 12:32PM on 9-23-2006
Is it just me, or isn't it faster/easier to enter the info directly into ical?
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David Chartier said 12:40PM on 9-23-2006
#4: Since you can do so much from within QS, and it doesn't matter what app you're in when you invoke it, this can be a *lot* faster for many people who are savvy enough with QS, especially when you factor in all the mousing and/or tabbing around in iCal to enter things like date and time.
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Tony said 1:10PM on 9-23-2006
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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Jonathan Baldwin said 2:37PM on 9-23-2006
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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Matt said 2:00PM on 9-23-2006
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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AHM said 2:31PM on 9-23-2006
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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Garrett Coakley said 2:34PM on 9-23-2006
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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AHM said 2:35PM on 9-23-2006
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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hmelman said 3:14PM on 9-23-2006
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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Evan said 8:41PM on 9-23-2006
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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macfan525 said 3:07AM on 9-24-2006
and this is supposed to be easy? c'mon!
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Kelmon said 11:29AM on 9-24-2006
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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Matt said 10:13AM on 9-24-2006
Brilliant! Working perfectly now with the double dash.
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Devin said 1:52AM on 9-25-2006
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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George Howard said 10:57AM on 9-25-2006
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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Brian H. said 9:56PM on 10-06-2006
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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Matt Turner said 6:04PM on 10-17-2006
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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