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.

Praise the heavens, do a little dance and buy Apple's iLife engineers a beer - iPhoto '08 finally solves a long-standing annoyance by allowing selective importing. In previous versions, iPhoto simply offered a big fat 'Import' button, giving you no choice in which images to bring over from your digital camera or mobile phone. Convincing me to agree with folks who say iPhoto is finally learning a few tricks from its older bigger brother Aperture, I plugged in my iPhone today to perform my first import into the new iPhoto, and I caught these two options: Import Selected and 'Hide photos already imported.' The new import dialog itself has been updated, presenting thumbnails of all the photos on the device you plugged in. This new Import Selected option allows you to manually select as many or as few images as you like (either by holding the command key to select individual photos or holding shift to select a range) and only import those. The 'Hide photos already imported' option, circled at the bottom left of the iPhoto window (above), is really handy for those who often import pictures off devices like mobile phones but would prefer to permanently keep at least some of them on the device for good posture. Toggling that will hide and review all the photos you've already imported, allowing you to keep those photos out of your way or reveal them to ensure your libraries are still in sync.

This is a great new feature that should bring smiles to both heavy and casual photo importers alike. I think I speak on behalf of a lot of iPhoto users when I say: thank you Apple.

Well shiver-me-timbers: while Aperture doesn't catalog anything but images, it at least helps you download 'non-image files' off your camera so you can manage them some other way. When I performed the initial import from iPhoto (using Aperture's handy File > Import > iPhoto Library command), a notification appeared at the beginning of the import letting me know that Aperture found a few files it wouldn't import. I realized the files in question were probably a few movies I shot with my point 'n shoot camera, which led me to assume that Aperture simply doesn't handle or even touch those files to begin with. Apparently, my assumption was a bit off.

As it turns out, plugging a camera or card into Aperture that contains either audio or video files (and possibly other types) will generate the dialog you see in this post, allowing you to download the files Aperture isn't designed to handle to another location on your Mac. This is great because you can set up another location to, for example, store all the home movies you've been shooting and manage those files with the Finder or another app like yFlicks once you're done working in Aperture.

As for those home movies in iPhoto, I guess I'll still need to dig those out some other way. Fortunately, iPhoto automatically applies the keyword 'movie' to all movies it imports, which should make this task a bit easier for anyone else making the upgrade to Aperture like I did.

Address Book is one of Apple's apps that might seem too basic at first glance to many a user. While this under-appreciation could largely be due to its unassuming name, Address Book offers a surprising amount of useful features, especially in the contact management department. Of course, there are the typical Apple-esque Smart Groups which you can use to automatically and dynamically round up contacts based on any criteria you want (family last names, employers or even notes you add yourself), but check out the Card menu in Address Book and note two options: Merge Selected Cards and (my personal favorite since I play with way too much synching software in the name of TUAW and Download Squad) Look for Duplicate Entries. Those are two great tools for ensuring your contacts only take up one entry each in Address Book (if you only want one entry for each, that is), and I highly recommend using Look for Duplicate Entries if things get out of hand, as it's saved me countless hours after botched synching sessions and wayward synching software had their way with my contacts.

Importing new contacts cards (usually .VCF files) is nothing very special, but Address Book is pretty smart when you import a card for someone already in you contacts list. Typically, Address Book will catch the potential duplication and offer you four options for managing both the old and new cards. A window will be presented with four buttons along the bottom: Keep Old, Keep New, Keep Both and Update, allowing you to ensure that you don't blow away old data you want to keep for the contact while importing anything new you might need.

Combine some of these tricks and tools with the Mail + Address Book tips Merlin Mann wrote about back in April, and you have some pretty powerful tools for managing your contacts and organizing the correspondence you have with them.

Kenneth Kirksey has posted two AppleScripts on the Yojimbo mailing list for importing your del.icio.us bookmarks into Yojimbo, complete with all your tags. You can get these scripts from the mailing list archives of course, but Kenneth gave me permission to host both of them here on TUAW to make things easier on you readers.

The first script, titled All del.icio.us to Yojimbo, imports all your del.icio.us bookmarks into Yojimbo, bringing along all of your tags to boot (If you're a messy tagger, I highly recommend tidying up your del.icio.us tags before you run this script). Per Kenneth's instructions, you simply need to download the text file we've zipped for you, copy all the code from the file into a Script Editor window, and then edit the "set delAccount" and "set delPassword" lines to add your account details in quotes.

The second script, called Last del.icio.us to Yojimbo, simply imports your most recent del.icio.us bookmark into Yojimbo. Same instructions apply.

Since these scripts make use of Yojimbo 1.3's new tag feature, I'm pretty sure these won't play well with previous versions. Feel free to share your experiences with the scripts here, and be sure to hit up the Yojimbo mailing list if you need more help with them.

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.

The fact that iPhoto, even the latest and shiniest '06 version, doesn't allow access to a camera's storage card to pick and chose which images get imported has irked users across this great planet of ours for years - until now. macosxhints has discovered that striking the return key twice when the import screen is displayed (upon connecting a camera or card) will enter users into a manual browsing mode, allowing them to browse their images directly from the device, the way it was meant to be (at least as an option; I'd bet this is yet another undocumented feature).

The original hint poster stated that they couldn't manually move images over; he/she could only browse them. Rob Griffiths, however, added that he could in fact manually import a custom selection of photos, suggesting that this might work on a per-camera basis. He requests, and I echo, that users who try this out post their camera model and experience over at macosxhints so they can get a good list of working models.

C.K. blogged delicious2safari what feels like a year ago, and not much has changed since. It still allows you to import your del.icio.us bookmarks into Safari as either a flat list or in folders according to your tags, except now it has gone the way of the Universal Binary.

delicious2safari is freeware and available from Christina Zeeh's site.

Google Importer is a Spotlight plug-in that can add a Google search to the list of results Spotlight returns. It is installed as a System Preferences pane with options to adjust how many results are gathered from Google, whether to show a link to an actual Google results page, and how many seconds to wait after the last key is typed to begin searching Google. Note: that last option only adjusts how long Spotlight waits to search Google, not the rest of your computer like many users have been asking for.

I haven't tinkered around with this, but it sounds like a nice idea as long as it doesn't hang the Spotlight search too much. Google Importer is donationware and available from Caffeinated Cocoa Software.

One question I see asked all over the place by switchers is how to move an address book from Outlook on Windows to Address Book in OSX. I've seen utilities and scripts out there that claim to do it, but I've never had or heard of much luck with them. If you're in the same boat, a post over at macosxhints.com lays out a down and dirty method using Mozilla's address book and Excel to shuffle all your contacts from Outlook into an LDIF format that OSX's Address Book can import.

Sounds nasty I know, but if you've been having issues like this and have all but given up - this could be your contacts' last hope. If anyone gives this a whirl, (I switched years ago) please feel free to post your experience.