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!

Those wizards of widgets at iSlayer have come up with yet another really useful tool for the Dashboard. Organized is a free widget with an event calendar, world clock, notes, and to-dos, all of which are synced to iCal and Mail.

As with other iSlayer widgets like iStat menus/nano/pro, it is obvious that a lot of thought went into the design of the user interface for Organized. It packs a lot of data into a very small widget and even has a feature I immediately turned on -- the ability to shut off Marker Felt as the default font for Notes.

If you download, install, and use Organized, consider sending these guys a donation so they'll continue to develop great stuff for us.

What's next for .Mac, Apple's much-maligned online service offering for OS X users? TUAW has learned that .Mac will no longer be sold by Apple after WWDC, as new users will migrate to the new MobileMe service (not too shocking, given the swirling rumors as of late). Existing users will have their @mac.com e-mail addresses forwarded to their @me.com address in perpetuity, which should provide some relief for nervous .Mac users who depend on that email.

MobileMe is slated to include a host of new features, which we alluded to early in May; in addition, there will be new web interfaces for all aspects of MobileMe -- calendars will look just like iCal, Contacts will look just like they do in Address Book, etc. This is similar to the way .Mac Webmail works today, though we've heard that the new interfaces will be much snazzier (yes, that's a technical term). Apple should also be updating the .Mac dependent applications (iChat, iWeb, iPhoto etc.) to work with the new service. The new service will be backwards compatible with .Mac protocols for the time being -- so developers will not have to rush out updates as soon as they hear the official word.

MobileMe is scheduled to be available sometime in late June/early July. We have also heard reports that the latest build of the iPhone beta firmware (2.0) has already undergone revisions to handle the new MobileMe service. Some of the features of the service on iPhone will include: over-the-air syncing of contacts, calendars, and photos. Interestingly, there is also a Windows version of MobileMe planned.

Though we're confident in the source of this information, this is still a rumor until Apple reveals all. We should hear more information about MobileMe at the World Wide Developer's Conference starting on Monday (June 9th).

If you love Things, you just got a whole lot more to love. The folks at Cultured Code have finally added iCal sync, and they've done a spectacular job with it (outdoing, in my opinion, OmniFocus' sync). In the preferences, you can sync just your "Today" tasks, or just your "Next Actions," or you can get crazy with it and assign calendars to different tags, projects or areas of responsibility. This allows for utterly amazing flexibility and an array of possibilities.

The major benefits of having Things synced with iCal all revolve around the tight integration that iCal and Leopard's To Dos have with the rest of OS X. Being able to refine what is actually synced means you have complete control over what you see on an iCal printout or even what you put on a public or shared calendar. To Dos can be delegated, emailed, linked, prioritized and more, and Things is picking up every external change I throw at it.

You can have a calendar that functions as an inbox and use whatever input method you like to get tasks there. The "@" symbol can be used to add tags as well. Moving a task from the inbox calendar to another calendar synchronized with Things will do exactly what you think it will ... move the task to the project or area of responsibility assigned to that calendar.

This also solves my other major problem with Things, no easy way to turn Mail.app messages into tasks. Now, with a right click to make a new To Do you can create a new task in Things that contains a link to the original message. Unfortunately, Mail.app's handling of To Dos is a little buggy in some cases, but that problem is easily taken care of by using MailTags to create the tasks.

The final reason I'm so excited about this new release is that Leopard To Dos are part of an API that all kinds of third-party programs can access, and can therefore integrate with Things now. Anxiety, Out of Mind, Today, MailTags and other little applications we've mentioned can all work in two directions with your task manager.

I'm a little obsessed with Charilaos Skiadas' GTDAlt bundle for TextMate right now (along with piles of Ruby code to extend it), but the new sync feature in Things made it extremely easy to pull my tasks in and take it for another spin. Having sworn off the "pretty" task managers and pledged my allegiance once again to all things plain text, I don't have the heart to change my system again quite yet ... but it's becoming obvious that when Things comes to fruition, it will be a force to be reckoned with. If this was holding you back (like it was me), it might be time to take a look. Things is going to be $49 after release, but you can still get in on it for $39 right now.

Core Security, in an advisory that showed a contentious argument with Apple, disclosed three iCal bugs that attackers could exploit using malicious servers, web sites, and .ics email attachments.

"The vulnerabilities may allow un-authenticated attackers to execute arbitrary code on vulnerable systems with (and potentially without) the assistance from the end user of the application or to repeatedly execute a denial of service attack to crash the iCal application," said Core Security.

The advisory states that iCal 3.01 running on Mac OS X 10.5.1 is still vulnerable, but it's unclear if the latest version of both iCal and Mac OS X (3.02 and 10.5.2, respectively) fix the problems. Apple asked Core Security to delay publication of its findings, but Core Security set May 21 as its drop-deadline.

Core Security first reported the bugs in January. Apple fixed one of the bugs in a security release in March (2008-002), but thought that the others were not as critical as Core Security did. After Apple pushed back the release date for the remaining patches several times, a frustrated Core Security said they would release details of the bugs.

[Via Macworld]

Update (June 1, 2008): The Washington Post notes that Mac OS X 10.5.3 patches the vulnerability.

Up until today, entering to-do info into iCal was an exercise for my mouse-clicking finger. I'd click iCal in the Dock, click again on that little pushpin icon, and then finally double-click to create an empty to-do task to fill in. One more double-click, and I could actually edit the to-do and put in the information I needed.

Enter FlexTD from flexgames. It's another unitasker, but it does one task very well - just hit a pre-defined hotkey and it brings up a transparent edit window. Type in your to-do, press return, and the info is entered into your favorite Mac calendar app.

One suggestion for the developers; the hotkeys only go up to F8, and I'd love to be able to assign something to F13 through F19 on my keyboard. How 'bout it?

The app is free, appears as a pref pane in System Preferences, and can start up at login. Many thanks to flexgames for a nice productivity booster!

Tip 'o the TUAW homburg to Elsa for the news!

Okay I promise this is that last time I'm talking about the WWDC schedule (I can't speak for my confreres). Earlier today Brett posted on a nice Ruby script to convert the data to a readable PDF. Yesterday when we first noted that the WWDC schedule was available I complained about the lack of iCal compatible files and apparently Adrian Kosmaczewski agreed. He proceeded to cook up a little script to make the necessary conversions. You can download iCal format ics files for the iPhone, Mac, and IT tracks at his website.

Second Gear, the same developers who bring you the PocketTweets Twitter client for the iPhone, have announced that Today 1.1 is now available.

Today is an app that works with your iCal database and provides easy browsing of your events and tasks in an attractive and unobtrusive window. Clicking the icons at the bottom of the window opens dialogs for entering new events and tasks in a way that is much easier than entering them into iCal directly.

What's new in Today 1.1?

• Better performance for those of us with big calendaring needs
• Filtering of the calendars that appear in the Today window
• Locations can be assigned for new events
• All day events have a new, more obvious appearance
• New event and task due dates default to the day that you're viewing
• Bugs have been squashed

Second Gear provides a 7-day test drive for download. The update is free for existing Today users, or you can purchase Today for $15.

Here's good news for users of 30 Boxes and Calgoo Hub. Earlier this week, Calgoo announced two-way iCal synchronization for 30 Boxes, Google Calendar, and Outlook. Calgoo account holders can get started by logging in to their account.

For the uninitiated, 30 Boxes is an online calendar that includes to-do lists, event management, people finder and more. Calgoo is a company whose mission in life is to simplify the calendars people use. It's their new Calgoo Connect service that lets iCal play nicely with these others.

Check it out, and let us know how it goes.

If you use iCal to store you important dates and events, and use it on a regular basis without syncing events via an iPod, iPhone, or other device, then you know how frustrating it can be when you forget about an appointment or event. I'm going to show you a way to automatically print your daily iCal agenda with a simple AppleScript. You can set this script to run when your Mac starts up so you never miss an appointment!


Continue reading to learn how to create this AppleScript.

After six weeks in beta (not long at all in Google-weeks), the new version 2.0 of iCal-sharing tool BusySync is out. The headline feature for 2.0 is of course the new iCal --> Google Calendar synchronization capability, which opens up a wide world of cloud-based options for families and workgroups already using the LAN-based sync of earlier versions. You can keep multiple iCal users synchronized (even on the same machine), sync remotely via Google, and more.

There are plenty other options for syncing your calendars with gCal, but if you need to keep more than one user's iCal coordinated (think family schedules!) then BusySync may be the product for you, starting at $25 per seat. The guys behind BusySync have a long history with Mac calendaring (including creating the late great Now Up-to-Date, which actually saw its first update in over a year last week) and I've been impressed with the quality of the beta release. We'll do a head-to-head comparison of the iCal sync options soon.

Continuing with yesterdays obsession with Cover Flow, here is something that you might not have known existed in Leopard. You can browse iCal events with Cover Flow right inside a finder window. All you have to do is open Spotlight up by clicking its icon in the top right corner of the screen (or pressing command + spacebar). Then type kind:ical into a new Spotlight search, and click "Show All." Your results will now be shown in a new Finder window.

Activate cover flow by going to View > Cover Flow (or press command + 4). When you find the event you want, you can double click its icon to open it in iCal.app.


[via Macworld]

We talk about iCal once in a while. Did you know that an iCal alarm can launch an AppleScript? A recent comment from reader Zach (and subsequent replies) made us think that this tip might be of use to anyone who hasn't considered the possibilities.

When you schedule an alarm in iCal, one of the options for the alarm is "Run script." If you select "Other..." from the script selection dropdown, you can choose any AppleScript you want to launch. Then you just tell the alarm when to go off and your script will run.

Considering that AppleScript can control quite a few of the applications on your mac, and that iCal can handle repeating events, the possibilities are wide open. You could do something as simple as schedule applications by putting the following into a script in Script Editor and saving it as a regular script:

tell application "Safari" to activate

and another one...

tell application "Safari" to quit

to quit. Of course, you could then add to the scripts to have Safari navigate to certain pages as well. And you could launch as many apps as you want in the same script. Anything you can do with AppleScript, you can schedule. For more Terminal-savvy readers, Applescript's "do shell script" command allows for an even wider range of possibilities. You can even get user interaction with a "display dialog" command. I'm sure there's someone here who could have a blast with this.

iCal is great for storing your calendars and appointments, but what if you want to export (or backup) your calendars in case of a data emergency? Well, you could backup your calendars manually; however, AppleScript is so much cooler. Let's automate the backup of iCal calendars through the use of an AppleScript.

Continue reading to learn how.

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.