A new widget has found its way onto my Dashboard: QuickCal. It makes adding iCal events as easy as typing a natural-language string such as "lunch with Aditi at noon tomorrow." The widget parses the text as you type and shows what it finds below the entry area, letting you know if it understands your syntax. It also adds reminders automatically, based on your preferences for all events, events more than a week away, and events more than a month away.

QuickCal seems to need the subject (title) of the event to be at the beginning of the string. Anything following the "at" or "on" clause is usually discarded. Since we're talking about "natural" language, this usually works out fine. It's not QuickCal's fault, but the only drawback for me is that my Dashboard takes far too long to start up, so any Widget I use has to carry that extra baggage on first load. I stopped running Dashboard Kickstart recently in an effort to speed up my wake time, but I may go back to it.

I've also really enjoyed FlexCal, an app which provides a hotkey-triggered HUD for entering iCal events and todos. In my opinion, anything which keeps me from having to load iCal and deal with the multi-step process of entering a new event is worth the money. Of course, both QuickCal and FlexCal are free, so there's no room for complaint. Be sure to make a generous donation if you dig one, the other, or both.

Second Gear Software released version 1.6 of Today on Tuesday, fixing some minor bugs and adding natural language parsing to create new events.

Today is a handy utility that fetches data from your iCal calendars, and displays only the events for today in a tidy list on your screen.

Adding an event was simple, thanks to the natural language processing. Typing in Thursday at 9 am or today at 2 pm for the start time or end time of a new event yielded good results.

Bug fixes included improvements to Spaces behavior when in menu-bar mode, and miscellaneous performance tweaks. Version 1.5, released in November, added Growl notifications and alarm support.

Today is $15, universal binary, and available as a 10-day trial. A screencast showing off the software's major features is also available on Second Gear's website.

Steve has reviewed a previous version of Today, and Brett spoke with developer Justin Williams at WWDC last year.