iCal is the calendar software that ships with every Mac. When combined with a MobileMe account, it's quite handy. In fact, iCal is the only calendar I use.

New users are often unaware of how much iCal can do. In this post, I'll focus on the types of alarms you can create. With a few simple steps, you can go beyond a simple beeping message.

First, create a new event. Simply double-click the proper time on the proper day and an hour-long event appears. Double-click the event, and the edit window appears. From here you can name your event, identify the location and duration (all day vs. timed), set repeat options and the target calendar if you maintain more than one (I don't).

Now for the fun part. Below the calendar option you'll see "Alarm." Clicking it reveals several options:

1. None (kind of self-explanatory)
2. Message (presents a dialog box on your Mac and iPhone/iPod touch if synced via MobileMe)
3. Message with sound (same as above with plus a system sound)
4. Email (send an email message to a given address)
5. Open file (Open a file on your Mac)
6. Run Script (My favorite. See below)

The first three are self-explanatory. When selecting a message and/or system sound, you have to option to display it minutes, hours or even days before or after the event. Likewise, you can chose any system sound you like.

The email option is nice as well. For instance, once the mini at my day job has completed its daily task, I have it send me an email as a confirmation. As long as I see that message, I know that everything's A-OK.

The option to open a file is handy, too. I'm using it to open a Keynote file right now, but you can have it launch a kiosk application, perhaps a broadcast app like Nicecast, etc.

Finally is run script. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not Applescript pro, but even I see the powerful potential here: Have iCal run any script you can write up at any time. Awesome! Finally, you can set more than one alarm to an event. For example, display a message and send me an email, just to be sure I make that meeting.

As you see, iCal can do much more than store your appointments. Now go be productive and have fun!

Yesterday I wrote about my love of the Mac mini. So dependable and unobtrusive, it's the Honda Civic of computers. In the post, I briefly described how we use Dropbox to send routinely-updated Keynote files to the mini. A few of you wrote to ask for details, so I decided to share that information here on the blog. We use two pieces of software: Dropbox and iCal.

Dropbox

Here's the setup. First, the Mac mini is connected to the projector in the Projection Room above the theater via DVI. Every day, it runs a slideshow before the orientation film. That slideshow contains sponsorship information, museum news, etc.

It's updated once a week or so by someone in the art department (we'll call her "Janie"). Janie's desk is a couple hundred yards and two buildings away from the Projection Room. The Keynote file lives in a Dropbox folder that both Janie's PC and the mini can access. Of course, we don't want Janie editing the slideshow while it's running before a room full of guests. That's where iCal comes in.

iCal

We stop showing the film at 4:00 PM and Janie arrives for the day at 9:00 AM, so we set up two repeating iCal events.

The first event launches the slideshow in the morning. Every weekday at 8:45 AM (doors open at 9:00), there's a repeating iCal event with an alarm set to open the slideshow where it lives in Dropbox. Note that the show has been set to run at launch and loop indefinitely in Keynote.

What about updating? Easy. We stop running the slideshow at 4:00 PM and Janie leaves for the day at 5:00 PM. A second repeating iCal event has an alarm that runs the following super-simple Applescript:

Tell application "Keynote"
quit
End tell

The script does just what you expect -- it kills Keynote. This runs at 4:05 PM each weekday, and frees Janie to spend 10 or 15 minutes updating the file from her PC just before she goes home. The next morning, the first iCal event re-launches the slideshow and the cycle repeats.

That's how two free pieces of software (iCal and Dropbox) combine with an inexpensive, consumer level one to create a simple and effective solution to a problem. Best of all, it doesn't require a computer science degree or even a week with a giant manual. The iCal events and script are invisible to Janie. All she knows is, "I open the folder on my PC, change the slideshow, hit Save and I'm done." Sure, we could have dumped it on a central server, set up some sort of FTP voodoo that would have given Janie a headache, etc. But why? If the simple solution works, use it.

If you try something similar, let me know how it goes. Thanks to everyone who asked about this.

Yesterday, amidst the SlingMobile débâcle and an OS update, Kerio Technologies released Kerio Mail MailServer 6.7. The mail and collaboration server, often used as a replacement for Exchange, has added several new features, including a few geared toward Mac users.

The Kerio Global Address List (GAL) is a new feature that provides a simple way to get address and contact info from clients like Outlook or Entourage. It syncs and authenticates with both Microsoft Active Directory and Apple Open Directory, as well as Kerio's own user directory. In any company, people join and leave the group, and users are often required to manually update their address books to add and remove entries. With GAL, it's a single directory in a single place, and changes are transparent for users. It supports Entourage, works with the iPhone and functions offline.

Kerio MailServer 6.7 also comes with an auto-configuration script for Entourage 2008, downloadable within the Kerio client, providing pre-configured account setup. There's support for private events in iCal, allowing users to maintain personal schedules without requiring a separate calendar application. AddressBook gets some additional love with support for synchronizing groups (which become Categories in Entourage).

Kerio has had good support for iPhone users for a while now. For non-iPhone mobile users, there's new support for viewing HTML emails on Nokia devices, as well as DataViz RoadSync compatibility.

The MailServer itself is now a certified VMWare appliance, and promotes compatibility with two new Linux distributions: Ubuntu 8 and Debian 5. CentOS is the preferred platform for running on VMWare. IT admins and users alike will appreciate the dramatically improved anti-spam engine, which has been optimized for multi-CPU use, parallel processing of email messages for large queues, improved heuristics and 13 layers of spam protection.

In addition to some of the previously available migration tools provided by Kerio, a new IMAP migration tool relieves what is undoubtedly one of the biggest headaches in switching mail servers: keeping your old mail. It's a cross-platform utility which moves messages, folders, accounts and domains from the old system to Kerio MailServer. The IMAP migration tool has been fully tested with OS X.

Kerio's pricing has remained the same with this release. Starting at $499 for 10 users, there's a range of options available for different configurations and add-ons, as well as subscription pricing. See Kerio's pricing page for more details.

I always have a problem with birthdays. I generally don't make a big deal about my own, and sometimes that leads me to forget my friends' big days. iCal helps me, and I have a few birthdays in there that have pop-ups a few days in advance. It works well, especially if I remember to make it a repeating alert from year to year.

Now, here's another solution that plays well with the iPhone or iPod touch. It's called Birthday Reminder [App Store link] and sells for $1.99US. It scours your contact list to pull birthday information, and shows you all the ones you have in a nice chronological list. You can also tap on anyone in the list and call or text them. It tells you when the birthday is coming up, and how old the person will be.

A couple of notes: First, I didn't know contacts even supported birthdays. You can add them on the iPhone or in the Mac app by selecting Add Field>Birthday. There are some other goodies in there too, like 'maiden name,' but that's a subject for another post.

After Birthday Reminder scans your contacts, you can set up the app to email you to jog your memory about upcoming birthdays. You can decide how many days in advance you want the warning, and you can also get sound effects with the notice, or not. You can't specify the time of day you get the warning; that's coming in version 1.1. As it is, they come at midnight, G.M.T.

At first, this app seemed a bit redundant, but as I used it I found it quite helpful and gave me a nice overview of birthdays I needed to worry about.

Here's some small nits... I don't think the GUI looks all that great. It is pretty plain, actually. I tried syncing the list to the developer's server for the email function. One day it worked fine. The next it kept crashing the app. You can't set multiple reminders. If you tell it to warn you 2 days in advance, that's all she wrote.

Birthday Reminder is a clever app. It's not life changing, but is certainly convenient to use. With a couple of the little bugs removed, and a few features added, I think it makes a nice, useful addition to your collection.

Wouldn't it be nice to get a weather forecast whenever you look at iCal? That's the premise behind WeatherCal 1.0, a new Mac application from Bare Bones Software.

WeatherCal inserts a five-day weather forecast for your favorite cities right into iCal (above). If you're syncing your iPhone to iCal, that means you have the forecast in your pocket as well:

WeatherCal is a nifty Preference Pane app from Bare Bones (of BBEdit and Yojimbo fame) that adds the ability to get weather forecasts in iCal by creating all-day events for each day with the relevant information (forecast plus high and low temperatures).

You can add different cities, each of which gets its own iCal calendar and you get forecasts up to 4 days in advance. And since iCal events obviously sync to the iPhone, you can take the forecast with you.

WeatherCal is $10 from Bare Bones Software; a demo version is available for download.

[via Macworld]

This time in Ask TUAW we're tackling questions about syncing iCal between two Macs, using an encrypted flash drive in a cross-platform environment, changing default applications, using the keyboard instead of the mouse, and more.

As always, your suggestions are welcome. Questions for next week should be left in the comments. When asking a question please include which machine you're running and which version of Mac OS X (we'll assume you're running Leopard on an Intel Mac if you don't specify). And now, on to the questions!

Earlier this week, I noticed that the calendars on my Mac and my iPhone weren't in sync. "More MobileMe nonsense," I thought. However, I soon found the culprit, and it wasn't MobileMe acting wonky. My account had expired, and I was within the 15 day grace period.

I saw the "Renew" button and reached for my wallet like a well-trained Pavlov iDog. Then something stopped me. "Do I really want to do this?" There are so many alternatives that offer nearly the same services. Calling upon my days as a used car salesman (true story), I pulled out a piece of paper and drew a vertical line down the center, labeling one side "Pros" and the other "Cons." Then, I got to work.

Pros

First of all, I should outline what I use MobileMe for. An email account, address book, calendar sync between my Mac and iPhone and iDisk storage. I don't use the photo galleries, though my kids' grandparents wish I did, or the web apps. With that in mind, here are the pros.

Everything is built in. There's nothing to download, install or configure. iCal, Address Book, Mail (OK, I have to set up an account. Nit-pickers) and iDisk are ready to go from the start.

My iDisk is accessible from the Finder, and things like MobileMe Galleries just work. Sounds like an easy choice, eh? Keep reading.

Cons

Honestly, it doesn't always "just work." The synchronization has been flaky in the past, and push notifications have been pokey. Granted, it's light-years beyond where it was after launch, but I don't really trust it 100%.

It's a bit pricey. The standard fee is $99US/year. I've got one additional email address for my wife, so tack on another ten bucks. Before you fly into an iRage, know that I realize that one hundred bucks for push email, contacts and calendar, 10GB online storage, web hosting and so on is not a bad deal. It's just that there are less expensive alternatives.

With Gmail, I can have email, address book and calendar for free. With Spanning Sync, [TUAW Spanning Sync posts here] I can sync Google Calendar and iCal in both directions for $25 per year or $65 as a one-time fee. And I can easily set up my iPhone to send and receive Gmail.

Let's look at the available-anywhere online storage. Here at the TUAW offices, we're big fans of Dropbox [TUAW Dropbox posts here]. Once installed, it's super easy to use. A menu bar item and a Finder window item make access a snap. Additionally, sharing files and folders is just as simple.

The first 2GB of storage are free. After that, you'll pay $9.99US/month or $99US/year for 50GB of storage.

So why not just switch? It's not that easy. My MobileMe email address is in heavy use. Not only among my contacts, but across many places online. Switching would be a hassle. I'm also held back by the "What If Factor."

There's a part of me, deep inside my cynical, self-deprecating heart that's convinced that the very day I cancel my subscription, Apple will release the MobileMe update of my dreams. It's the same certainty that prevents me from buying a DVD player or a Blu-ray player as I watch my VHS tapes.

For now, I've got 14 days to decide. I'll let you know what I chose in a future post.

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.

BusyMac, makers of the awesome BusySync, has just announced its newest offering: BusyCal. BusySync is a great way to share and sync calendars across a LAN and sync with Google Calendar. BusyCal is a calendar application with the BusySync technology baked in.

The screenshots have BusyCal looking very iCal-esque (BusyMac's website even says to think of BusyCal as "iCal Pro"), but with some additional features:

• Display graphics, icons and themes
• Add sticky notes to your calendar and share them across your network
• Live weather feeds within the calendar
• Rich text support
• Multi-user editing/offline editing
• Sync with the iPhone via iTunes and Mobile Me
• Sync with Google Calendar
• Sync with other Macs on your network with Bonjour

So the inevitable question is, "Why not just use BusySync or Google's Calaboration utility?" Because iCal's To Do lists don't work with Google Calendar. Specifically, you can't create a To Do for a calendar that is set to sync with Google Calendar. So if you are like me, that means you have to maintain separate calendars (often an identical calendar) just to keep a To Do list or have a calendar integrated with a GTD app.

The beauty of BusyCal is that you can add more stuff to your desktop calendar without losing support for MobileMe or Google Calendar or Sync Services.

BusyCal will require OS X 10.5 Leopard and will debut this Spring. Pricing is $40 US, but if you use BusySync already or buy it before BusyCal is released, the upgrade will be just $10 US.

BusyMac is at Macworld 2009 and we'll be sure to stop by the booth and take a closer look.

Although the plumbing has been in place since the summer, it's always nice to have an official announcement, and now we do: Google has gone on the record with its support for CalDAV syncing from iCal to Google Calendar. You can now gracefully sync your editable Google calendars with your (Leopard-only) iCal, keeping a local copy of those events in the cloud.

Granted, both BusySync (which adds Bonjour-based iCal synchronization between Macs) and SpanningSync (which includes Address Book --> Google contact sync) have been handling this task with aplomb for some time, and they offer something Google hasn't -- a nice GUI for picking your sync options. That too has been addressed: Google Code is hosting the Calaboration sync setup tool, a basic checklist of calendars to add to your iCal setup.

If you are syncing your iCal and gCal data via Google's support for CalDAV, let us know how it's going.

One of the most frequent questions we hear from readers on our Ask TUAW posts (and for our doting Aunt TUAW) is a simple one, with no simple answer: "How can I replace the synchronization features of MobileMe with a free service or a software package that doesn't cost me $99 a year?" We feel your pain.

For anyone looking to cut their cash outlay and maintain multi-Mac data sync, there are options for calendaring (BusySync, Google's CalDAV support) and some for address books (address-o-sync, or the free Google & Yahoo sync in Leopard's Address Book), and some products that handle both calendars and contacts (SpanningSync, Plaxo) -- but if you're in the mood for a free all-in-one approach, you may want to check out a promising beta service from a team of European developers: fruux.

Starting with address book sync in earlier versions, fruux has now progressed to include calendar, task and bookmark sync via Apple's built-in apps (Address Book, iCal & Safari) and a cloud service that stores the synchronized data. The system pref pane interface is no-frills and the product is definitely still a work in progress (there are prominent warnings to back up your data beforehand and frequently thereafter), so it may not suit your needs just yet -- but it's definitely one to watch. Future roadmap plans include an iPhone client and a web interface to your PIM data.

Thanks Dominik, Hagen & everyone who sent this in.

How many times have you been watching TV and wanted to quickly add a to-do or event (maybe both) to iCal? In this Mac Automation post, I'm going to show you how to create both a to-do and an iCal event from within Automator. You will be able to add new items to iCal without ever having to open it. Let's begin.

Creating the Automator Workflow (New iCal Event)
First we need to create an Automator workflow that will add the to-do and event to iCal. To create the workflow, just add the "New iCal Events" action to the workflow area. Before you continue, be sure to click the "Options" button at the bottom of the action and select the "Show this action when the workflow runs" checkbox.

Saving the Automator Workflow
To give you quick and easy access to the creation of iCal events, you can choose the Save As method of your choice.

Running the Workflow
To run the workflow, click the "Run" button in the top-right corner of Automator (or launch it as an application). When you run the workflow, you will be presented with a dialog that will ask you to specify a Name, Date, Time, and other information. When you press "Continue," the workflow will create the event in iCal.


Keep reading to learn how to quickly create to-dos in iCal.

I'm a pretty big user of Google Calendar, because I like how I can automatically sync it with my BlackBerry. The problem for me has been that on my desktop, I really prefer iCal's interface. Syncing the two can be cumbersome. We've written about third-party programs that can sync iCal and gCal together in the past, and although those are great -- I have still wanted a native way to sync the two calendars together.

Well, fortunately, Google has just quietly introduced CalDAV support to Google Calendar. CalDAV is the protocol that iCal uses to transmit data over the web. Although some other mail and calendar programs support CalDAV, right now Google Calendar is only compatible with iCal. Finally, iCal and Google Calendar can sync without having to use third party programs!

After following Google's detailed instructions, you can add your Google calendar account to iCal. Any changes you make in iCal will be transferred over to Google and appear in Google Calendar within about 15 minutes. Likewise, any changes made in gCal will be updated immediately from iCal. If you use a BlackBerry, which also syncs directly with gCal, those changes will be updated on all sides as well.

So does this mean that third-party syncing utilities have no place? Well, just based on my initial tests this morning, they are safe for at least a little while. Although sync support works perfectly, you have to create a new calendar account for each individual calendar you want to access. Additionally, if you have a calendar called "Home" on your Mac and a different calendar called "Home" in gCal, you can't just sync those two together. You'll need to either import all your iCal data into Google first, and then sync with the new calendar, or transfer the information over from one calendar to the other within iCal. Programs like BusySync and Spanning Sync allow syncing of designated calendars with one another.

Still, this is a huge step in the right direction and I'm just happy that I can import my mobile calendar onto my desktop without having to run a background utility. CalDAV support for Google Calendar requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's version of iCal. The Google Calendar service is free.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

[via Google Operating System]

Being the paranoid person that I am, it occurred to me that it would be a good idea to back up Address Book and iCal before all of the syncing madness begins between Macs, MobileMe, "the cloud", and iPhone/iPod touch. Here's how to do it (Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard only):

Backing up Address Book

1. Launch Address Book
2. Select File > Export > Address Book Archive
3. Find a location to save the Address Book archive, then click the Save button.

Backing up iCal

1. Launch iCal
2. Select File > Backup iCal
3. Find a location to save the iCal backup, then click the Save button.

Backing up iPhone / iPod touch

1. Just sync it

Ahhh, don't you feel all safe and happy now? And remember, if you're running Leopard and Time Machine, your backups are going to be backed up, too!