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YABI: iCal birthday and anniversary alarms done right

by David Chartier Dec 8th 2006 at 4:00PM

Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's iCal introduced a 'Show Birthdays calendar' option which automatically adds an all-day event for any contacts who have birthdays listed in Address Book. It's smart, but it isn't very flexible - there is no option for alarms and no way to add extra information like age or details of an impending party. Enter YABI: yet Another Birthday Importer, which aims to bring power and flexibility to the way iCal imports birthday events, as well as anniversaries (scroll down a little on the page). Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings has a nice writeup of key features, but to summarize, YABI can:
  • display a person's age in the event title
  • add events to the calendar of your choice
  • set a configurable alarm
  • chose exactly which contacts to import events for
  • decide how many years to repeat the events
  • and more
YABI strikes me as another one of those 'shoulda been in Tiger' apps, as it fills so many holes left by iCal's paltry implementation of this feature. Fortunately, it's a Universal Binary and free at least while in beta.

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Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's iCal introduced a 'Show Birthdays calendar' option which automatically adds an all-day event for any contacts who...
 

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Russ

I just downloaded YABI without reading the comments. What a mistake. I did not know the default was to wipe out my entire calendar of hunmdreds of events and meetings. YABI also extracted the birthday dates in my Address Book, and changed the format , making a date like 9/25/55 into 25/09/55 - a meaningless date. This is dangerous software!

December 15 2006 at 10:43 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
unixo

Hi Grant,

now it's present a checkbox which let you to decide if wipe or not existing data (before was only a user defaults preference)

December 14 2006 at 4:21 AM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Grant Beaver

I tried this program and used it to import address book dates into a calendar I had already created. It wiped out ALL of the dates I'd already put in. Use this at your own risk, and if you DO use it, don't import into an already existing address book!

December 09 2006 at 1:53 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Jay Riether

'shoulda been in Tiger' ... I think Apple does an excellent job of providing "proof of concept" apps that demonstrate how things should be done. And I think they intentionally leave the more advanced, complex add-ons such as this to give the industry something to expand upon the core functionality Apple provides.

iCal is great for the average user. Does it do everything? No. Should it? I don't think so. Apple's doing a great job to create the sparks to ignite ideas like this.

December 08 2006 at 8:35 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
Rich Gee

Don't download this! I just loaded it, added the birthdays to my iCal Work calendar and IT WIPED OUT ALL OF MY CALENDAR info! This is AWFUL!

December 08 2006 at 8:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
David Chartier

Woops! Thanks for the catch Matthew. We link Hawk Wings quite a bit, and him and I have plotted and planned together in the past. The link must have goofed when I was trying to save before running out the door; I have since updated the post.

December 08 2006 at 7:05 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
drew

Cool idea but brushed metal UI? Yucky

December 08 2006 at 5:56 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
matthew

Just in case someone wanted to actually read Tim's post: http://www.hawkwings.net/2006/12/08/yabi-a-smarter-birthday-calendar-for-ical/

December 08 2006 at 4:18 PM Report abuse rate up rate down Reply
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