Today, I was messing around in the Calendar.sqlitedb file associated with the iPhone's on-line calendar application. I was surprised to discover that the onboard calendar contains all the table support needed for to-do tasks, i.e. CREATE TABLE Task (ROWID INTEGER PRIMARY KEY AUTOINCREMENT, summary TEXT, priority INTEGER, due_date INTEGER, completion_date INTEGER, calendar_id INTEGER);.

As of right now, this information is completely useless. Tasks won't sync to or from the iPhone. Still, it's good to see where Apple might expand their software. It's a direction that many users would find helpful. So c'mon, Apple, please add to-do list support to the iPhone.

If you're iCal-based for your scheduling needs and you want to share calendars with family or colleagues, you're probably already hip to BusySync and the delights of iCal syncing Mac-to-Mac without a .Mac account. Now the BusySync team has announced a key feature for 2.0, shipping in February: Google Calendar synchronization. You should be able to share calendars across the internet with other Google Calendar users, and if they have BusySync on their machines the Gcal data will slide neatly into iCal for them.

BusySync 2.0 will ship for $24.95 per computer, a $5 price increase -- if you buy a BusySync 1.5 license today for $19.95, you can upgrade for free to the new version. There's also a public beta on the way if you want to check it out.

iTunes has an update for the new iPod Classic and the new Nanos, and while the update doesn't have a description at all, MacRumors sez:

• Improved CoverFlow
• Quicker menus
• And the much awaited video out fix, among a few other interface tweaks

Apparently there's a new option that will "Ask" users to output video when a compatible cable is connected. And some people say that the calendar and contacts will synch better as well, although I have the same reservations I have whenever I hear about unlisted feature updates -- if Apple did make it better, why didn't they want to tell us? Wouldn't they want us to know the iPod works better than ever?

At any rate, if you think it works better, then more power to you-- enjoy your updated iPod. As always, the update can be grabbed by connecting up your Classic or Nano to iTunes and hitting "Check for Updates."

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Take a look at this page describing the new iPod's touch capabilities. Now, look at this older version via Google cache. Are they the same?

In the current version, the first paragraph reads:

"...And iPod touch features a touchscreen QWERTY keyboard perfect for browsing the web in Safari, searching for videos on YouTube, finding music on the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, or adding new contacts."

In the cached version, the end of that sentence reads:

"...searching for videos on YouTube, finding music on the iTunes Wi-Fi Music Store, entering calendar events, or adding new contacts."

It seems that "entering calendar events" has disappeared. A last minute adjustment? We'll have to get our hands on one to see what's what.

Thanks, Jools!

Yesterday my co-blogger Dave Caolo was lamenting the fact that there's no easy way to get his iPhone and Google Calendar to sync (although purchasing Spanning Sync is certainly an option). While it is true that the iPhone's Calendar app only syncs with iCal on a Mac (or, via this trick, Entourage as well), I replied to Dave's woes with: who needs sync, anyway?

I am a happy iCal/iPhone/Google Calendar syncher, thanks to Spanning Sync, but I realize that one man's cup of tea is another man's grubby water. For those that would prefer to simply stick with Google Calendar for all their calendaring, the service actually scales incredibly well for an iPhone. This isn't an iPhone-specific UI or portal like so many other companies are launching. Rather, it seems to be their streamlined UI designed for most mobile phones. Either way, the list of upcoming events looks great, and all you need to do is visit the standard calendar.google.com on your iPhone to get redirected.

While the iPhone signifies a massive leap ahead in mobile phone technology, it also has apparently leapt ahead of its big brother Mac OS X in a few key areas. Since iCal's debut in Apple's darling desktop OS, it has (to my knowledge) never displayed the correct date in the Dock; it's always been set on July 17th until you actually start iCal which causes it to reflect the proper date. The iPhone, on the other hand, must have received some spit and polish from the OS X engineers, because its iCal (or is it officially called Calendar?) displays the proper date every day, even if you don't start the app. In a way this makes sense, because virtually every mobile phone's home screen provides easy access to the time and date, so Apple had to get this right. Still, it would be nice if iCal in Mac OS X could catch up to its baby brother and do something as advanced as display the proper date in a Dock icon.

As you might have heard, I ended up waiting in line for my iPhone at the Sherman Oaks, CA Apple Store. Yes, I managed to get one on Friday evening (two, in fact) and went with the 8GB variety. I was very excited to get the device and had a great experience in line with my fellow enthusiasts -- even with the long wait. All in all, a very pleasant time with some very interesting people who were just as excited to be there as I was.

Once I got home from the Apple Store, I proceeded through the activation of my iPhone via iTunes. When it got to the screen allowing me to port my existing mobile number over to AT&T, I hesitated, thinking I would play it safe and test out the iPhone a little before committing 100% to AT&T. So, I opted for a new number and went on through the activation process.

However, now that I've had the chance to use the device for a couple days, I will most likely port my number from T-Mobile over to AT&T. I anticipate being able to do that with a minimum of fuss but I will, of course, detail my experiences, good or bad, when I do it tomorrow via the AT&T "Porting Department."

After going through the entire activation process, I received the activation text message from AT&T about ten minutes later and was good to go to make calls, access the Internet via EDGE, etc. So, unlike some others, activation was a painless process for me. Immediately, I went to work on the iPhone. First, I adjusted my settings in iTunes to sync the various information, songs, podcasts, TV shows or movies that I wanted on my iPhone.

Plaxo is an online address book and calendar manager that can synchronize your information between Outlook, Google, Yahoo!, AIM, your Apple apps and more. Today they released version 3.0 which includes a number of improvements, like:

• Google Calendar synchronization
• Calender "countdowns" to important events
• Improved reminders

Best of all, Plaxo is free. It's still in beta, so take that into consideration before you try it out.

The busy bees at Chronos have indeed been... busy. Not to be content with the recent release of SOHO Notes 6, the company has gone ahead and dropped SOHO Organizer 6, their "powerful contact, calendar and note manager" that could be compared to an Entourage on steroids (that doesn't suck), sans the email component, but including SOHO Notes. Adding to a list of roughly a zillion already existing features, SOHO Organizer 6 brings calendar publishing to the web, connecting to CalDAV servers for collaborative editing, calendar import/exporting and - naturally - subscribing to published calendars. As SOHO Organizer 6 brings some features that are really focused on the business user, its $99 price will likely also appeal to the more power and business users in the crowd.

For those who are upgrading or need more than one license, a $49.99 price is offered to users of SOHO Organizer 5.x, and family packs are available.

Got a place you need to be at 3:00? Want to send yourself a message to get out the door at 2:40? Terminal's "leave" command offers a simple way to remind yourself about your upcoming schedule. leave 0240 waits until 2:35 and then alerts you to get ready to leave with both text and a beep. Reminders occur at 5 minutes and 1 minutes before the time you enter, and then every minute after until you close the terminal window. (You can also kill the process whose id is listed for you when you issue the leave command.)

Leave uses a 12-hour clock so you don't have to worry about whether to use 0240 or 1440. Both produce the same result. All times are assumed to be within the next 12 hours.

You can also use the "+" flag to set a relative time. Say you want to work on a project for just the next hour. Use leave +0100. This sets an alarm for one hour from the current time.

I recently posted about accessing the calendars in your /usr/share/calendar directory. Jewish readers may have noted that the default calendar.judaic file is sadly out of date. The Jewish year does not line up exactly with the standard Christian calendar.

Josef Grosch maintains an up-to-date version of calendar.judaic that you can download at his ftp site. Download a copy, uncompress it (we recommend using the Unarchiver) and replace the standard 2002 version with the latest 2007 (11 Tevet 5767 - 22 Tevet 5768) release to bring your calendar file up to date. April 16 2007 will go from being the 19th day of the Omer (using the 2002 dates) to the 13th (with the 2007 dates).

On Sunday, I posted about the built-in calendars found in /usr/share/calendar. These calendars include listings of events from around the world and for religions, e.g. calendar.history and calendar.christian. Today, I thought I'd share some ways to access those calendars from the command line.

On pretty much any version of Mac OS X, you can use the built-in calendar command to list the events of the day. The -f flag allows you to select which calendar you want to access. The calendar.world file references all the other English-language calendars.

% calendar -f /usr/share/calendar/calendar.world
 Apr 13 Thomas Jefferson born, 1743
 Apr 12 Confederate troops fire first shots of Civil War at Ft Sumter, 1861
 Apr 12 Space Shuttle Columbia launched, 1981
 Apr 12 Yuri Gagarin becomes the first man in space, 1961
 Apr 13 Laotian New Year (3 days) in Laos
 Apr 13 National Day in Chad
 Apr 13 Songkron Day in Thailand
 and so forth...
 %

You can embed this command into your startup files like ~/.bashrc so the events of the day display whenever you open a new shell. Unfortunately, the calendar command does not seem to work properly on my Intel-based Mac Mini; Mike reports that it works just fine on his MacBook Pro. If your Intel Mac is balking at the calendar command, you can use grep as a workaround: grep `date +%m/%d` /usr/share/calendar/calendar.*

A recent update to the official Google Notifier app has added a slick (and apparently Mac-only) feature that should make it easier to add events to Google Calendar while you work. A new "Quick Add to Google Calendar" contextal menu item does exactly what you might think - it allows you to right-click a selected piece of text in most Cocoa apps and create a new event in gCal from it, set for the specific time you used said option. Now this might not offer the flexibility of the Google Calendar Quicksilver module we mentioned, but it's a really handy way to rapidly fire off events based on information and text you're already dealing with throughout the day, and you can easily visit your Google Calendar to organize and manage their specific details at your convenience.

There only way I caught this update, however, was downloading what I perceived to be the latest Notifier from Google on a new machine. Strangely, upon first running the Notifier, I was prompted to download an update which is what brought on this new feature. If you haven't been prompted yet, try restarting your Notifier to see if it kicks the update process into gear.

Here at TUAW we're all about the public service. Really. We would hate for you to be late for brunch on Sunday, so once again let us remind you that Daylight Saving Time starts in most of the US & Canada this weekend. This year, thanks to regulatory changes, the one-hour shift starts three weeks early and ends one week later than in previous seasons. Of course, any gadget or widget with date logic in it sold before 2005 has no idea of the new rules, so this seemingly minor change has the impact of a nano-sized Y2K -- off by an hour, off by a millennium, same hassles.

The good news for Mac users is that OS X has, since version 10.4.5, included the new schedule; the recent software updates provided corrected settings for time zones outside the US and patches for 10.3 and Java. Better news: since OS X and similar Unix-like systems use Universal (Greenwich Mean) time internally, Mac clock chips don't have to worry about DST; the offset is handled in software. Windows, on the other hand, sets the hardware clock to local time; this causes the Boot Camp "five hours off" behavior and is the subject of much gnashing of teeth.

Of course, if it were a Mac-only world, things would be shiny and clean, but real life is gritty and messy. Assuming you're running some products from Microsoft, you can get the basics for fixes and updates here. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that things are going all that well with the big MS and DST: reader Chris points us to where eWeek has the scoop on the frustrations. Better call and check those brunch plans.

MagiCal is a cool little calendar application from Charcoal Design. As you can see it just puts a drop-down calendar in your menubar for easy access. In addition, you can actually "tear off" a month and leave it on your desktop (handy for making reservations, I find). MagiCal can also add the date and time in a customized format to your menubar, if you want to use it instead of OS X's built-in clock.

While my favorite menubar calendar remains the more full-featured MenuCalendarClock, it is $20 and MagiCal is a free download (donations requested). One last cool thing about MagiCal is that the developer offers three versions for download: Universal Binary, PPC, and Intel. The single platform ones are indeed about half the size of the UB. Personally, I wish more developers would consider doing this.