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.

Not long after I bought my first personal Mac in late 2004, I stumbled across an article that mentioned Ulysses, a text editor geared toward creative writers -- essentially the marriage between a word processor and project management software. It allows you to have all documents within a writing project at your grasp. As a journalist and author, Ulysses was a dream come true, but expensive. Costing more than $100 at the time, it didn't fit into a journalist's salary.

I wound up using CopyWrite for a time and was fairly satisfied with it until I read in a forum that people were having luck with a program which, at the time, was called Scrivener Gold. I gave the free beta a try and was blown away by the program's potential. When the full-fledged release of Scrivener came out in early 2007, I bought a license as a birthday gift for myself.

Scrivener pulls all the things needed for a complete writing project -- be it writing a script, novel, research paper or newspaper/blog articles -- together in one location and has so many features that even after nearly three years of use, I don't think I've fully explored all that it has to offer. I recently started work on writing my first graphic novel, and have really gotten the chance to flex Scrivener's muscles.

Some people like to have unique avatars for forums and instant messaging clients. I don't. My avatars usually end up being silly pictures of myself because I'm a shallow narcissist...and a bit lazy.

However, for those more creative than I, Persona [iTunes link] is a nice iPhone app in which to invest the price of a quarter-pounder. It allows the user to create a cartoon face by choosing from a variety of facial features. Hair style, eyes, nose, beard, and more are all up for grabs.

When you're done creating a mini-you (remember my personality issue described above), you can set it as the contact picture for any of your iPhone's contacts. You can also save your creation to the Camera Roll where you'll be able to export it via email or MMS (assuming you have the new 3.0 firmware and don't have AT&T), publish it to MobileMe, or use it as your wallpaper if you did a particularly good job. Once on your computer, you'll be able to use it as the avatar for that cute-cat-picture forum you visit eight times each day.

Persona is simple enough; in fact, perhaps too simple. The faces tend to look very similar as the options are quite limited for a dedicated app such as this. Also, what's going on behind my left shoulder? Every avatar I create is staring in that same direction!

Choosing from the available options isn't very intuitive. You choose the "parts" category and then pick the individual attribute, but no moving or resizing of the facial features is allowed. And very few accessories are presented, other than odd inclusion of a plethora of choices for nicotine deployment. (Note to self: see if the folks at Persona are sponsored in any way by Philip Morris.)

Overall, it's a nice idea for an app that will have moderate appeal to the forum crowds. I doubt you'll be using it again and again, though, because the app just doesn't offer much depth. But it's the user interface and lack of extensive options that tend to make the $2.99 $.99 a bit hard to swallow.

[NOTE: Thanks to those readers that pointed out the incorrect price. The developer's web site showed $2.99 when I wrote this, however the iTunes store had it at $.99. I have talked with Alfonso Bozzelli, the app's author, and he is changing the site to reflect the correct price -- $.99.]

Have you seen anything like that already, where developers have said, well we thought about doing it this way, but we're going another way?

PR: Too early. The phones aren't even out yet, user experience hasn't occurred yet. I would say July, we'll get a lot of feedback once these games come out with push notifications. The other thing that's kind of interesting, by the way, is that OpenFeint is working on cross-compatibility, because if I have a 2.2 iPhone and you have a 3.0 iPhone, and you send me a social challenge, in my app on 2.2, it won't show up as a push notification, right, because I don't have the 3.0 iPhone. So we are support the concept of push notifications in the plumbing and infrastructure of OpenFeint, however on a 2.2 phone, whenever the user next opens the app, they would see a screen that is an OpenFeint screen that would have a notification saying "you've got to beat my score," as opposed to seeing it on the iPhone icon, as a number, like the Mail thing, where it says you have notes waiting for you.

So I think as a user experience, the jury's still out, because the platforms are just getting ready, right? So the key here is to say that we're going to make it trivial by continuing our tradition, which is no servers, very easy to integrate, and some big games will launch in July with push notifications and then we'll go from there.

I think, to a certain extent, the same thing will happen on the microtransactions side. It already has happened with Xbox Live -- I don't know if you remember the story of horse armor, where everyone says "how can you release a different graphic and ask us to pay for it?" Have you seen examples yet of how developers want to use microtransactions? Are they aware of that danger or are they fearful of that at all?

PR: So I think the obvious one, just because I have, as I said, investments in companies in the Facebook app space, the big reason for microtransactions is virtual goods. So any kind of virtual world, avatar apps, some of these Mafia iMob apps, you can assume that there will be virtual goods unlocking with microtransactions. That one I think will translate over fairly well, in fact Net is going next week to China, where he's a keynote speaker at Tencent's annual conference. Tencent is an Asian company which does a billion dollars in microtransactions, all of it virtual goods. So I think that microtransactions, as we see them on social networks today, will come pretty much that way onto the iPhone social network, or the iPhone gaming network.

NJ: I also think that it will actually lead to the pricing, might even drop dramatically, but those who are charging for applications are going to go free, because they're going to earn much more by making it free and leveraging microtransactions.

Yeah, if you're charging $4 for an app and can sell four levels for $1 each, that's the way to go.

NJ: The user starts playing, gets very engaged, and wants to get to the next level and make the purchase, and it's very difficult not to make the purchase if you're engaged and you want to continue the game.

PR: The thing that's a little trickier, I think, is when you have microtransactions that aren't directly virtual goods, because virtual goods don't fit the theme. But are like chapters, or just additional content in the game. Then, I think, the business model is a little trickier, because that's your content update strategy, and to some extent, the iPhone user is used to -- like, if you look at the success of Pocket God, it's a double edged sword. If you talk to the Pocket God guys, their game is one of the few games that stays in the top five constantly. It's just always in the top five. And they use OpenFeint, and they're going to use push notifications, but when we spoke to him about microtransactions, he said, I have to figure that out, because their commitment to their userbase is, every week you're going to get an update with more content. So given that he's already committed that on the current price point, how does he unlock more content with microtransactions? So he was the first to say I definitely want to do push notifications, but I have to think hard about how I could incorporate microtransactions into Pocket God. So I do think there's a little more complexity there, especially when it's not just direct virtual goods. But I think they'll crack it. I think some other people we're talking to are certainly thinking of Chapter 1, Chapter 2, Chapter 3, three microtransactions. And certainly the virtual goods guys are like no questions how they'll do it.

And there are definitely precedents for both, in terms of episodic gaming on other services. Jason maybe you can talk about this, too, as a developer -- I'm really interested in the balance between making sure that what you're selling people is worth it, or something that's not. If you're asking to pay a dollar for a gun that's just a re-skin, people won't go for that. What do you think of that?

JC: I think, as a game designer, what you have to really think about is the motivations for why people will want to purchase this content. Whether it's a re-skin or not is less important than what it will allow you to do in the game. And the reason why I think virtual goods have done so well on social networks is that social pressure is a huge motivator to getting people to do things, and if part of that social pressure results in you engaging and buying virtual content, people are much more likely to do it. I mean, if you just have another gun that allows you to increase your DPS by two points, that's not terribly interesting to anyone but the ultra hardcore gamer, and then they'll probably just be pissed off that they have to pay for it. So that's not really an appropriate way to go about it. As a traditional gamer, buying episodic content or buying level packs, or substantially new gameplay experience, fits with my head, and then virtual goods, I think, have to be motivated through social pressure.

And the last question I have is just about the future of OpenFeint. I have to give it you guys -- there were quite a few, and there still are, services poking around that want to do the kind of stuff that you're doing. And just in terms of size and influence right now, you're kind of the top of the heap. So what's next, are you planning to kind of sit on the heap and just keep things set, or are you still aiming to improve here?

PR: I think that definitely we will continue to innovate and add more services to the platform -- there's no question that it's a platform play, and that we will continue to add features and additional things. I would say two things: one is, we will publish games, always, on top of our own platform technology, that will really kind of push the borders of gameplay design around the OpenFeint platform, to sort of demostrate and lead the way. So in the last announcement, we did hint at a new game coming out this summer based around push notifications and microtransactions, where we want to lead the industry. Because we never think that by being in front today, that we will be always in front. So we want OpenFeint to be the premiere platform, we agree that today, we certainly feel like it's way up there, but we feel like you constantly have to build new product on top of your platform to really make a world class platform. Because otherwise you're just sort of opining and thinking oh, this is good stuff. So we always want to test our own platform, and expect a title this summer based on OS 3.0 and OpenFeint features.

The second thing, which is, I think we're really doing something different around the business model. Ngmoco announced their Plus+ platform this week, and it's really a publishing tool rather than an open platform, and we're pretty proud of the fact that we're sort of the biggest player who is really able to provide an open platform where a developer does not have to make a publishing deal with us in order to get access to the platform. Ngmoco's platform is hey, we have this platform, it's part of our publishing network, and if you want to publish games with us, that's how you get the platform, and obviously you know the economics of the publishing business in the game industry, right? There's revenue that has to be sacrificed there. So I think as a guiding strategy, we will never make our platform related to anything with our publishing because it's our belief that this OpenFeint thing does two things that we will always have to provide for publishers: no servers, because 90% of developers have no experience building servers, they build great console games, client side stuff, C, C++ programming, all this stuff, but they really don't have any backend experience. And two, we're not going to take rev share, in terms of publishing deals. And those two things, I think, are sort of our long-term guides. The third thing is to build our own games constantly, so we can use Danielle and Jason's game design and knowledge to say here's the kind of games we can do. So if we can do that and execute, I think, with some fingers crossed, with some luck, we'll emerge as the de facto standard, which is our goal.

I had talked to Danielle a little about pricing already, but I wanted to ask about microtransactions as well -- when you do that stuff, are you not skimming off revenue as it comes through, or what is the pricing scheme there?

PR: Well even today, we have cross promotion inside OpenFeint 2, even before microtransactions, where if two players meet in a lobby, and they're from different games, then one player clicks on the other player's game, and you go to the App Store and you buy that other player's game? That's what you call our one-touch iPromote product inside of OpenFeint, it's a big draw for a lot of developers, because our community is now three million and growing -- we call it our social bazaar, because the App Store is so cluttered now that it's hard to differentiate. So you use OpenFeint and get your game in front of three million people in these lobbies. That revenue, when someone buys a game using OpenFeint's cross promotion feature, doesn't come from the developer, it comes from Apple. Because we are an Apple affiliate, through BigShare. So we take the user into a webview, which is our own catalog, where you can buy games off the App Store, and then Apple actually pays us. So that's hopefully -- this is the same thing, the whole idea is to get Apple to pay us every time there's a purchase in the App Store, including in-app purchases, as opposed to the outside.

Great. That's pretty much everything I had to ask, was there anything else you wanted to share? I guess we'll keep an eye on the game coming out this summer.

JC: Yeah, I guess the only other thing worth mentioning is that OpenFeint is available now -- it can be downloaded by anyone from our website. It's real.

Cool. Thanks very much.

Danielle Cassley and Jason Citron are the folks with their names on Aurora Feint, but as Danielle told us in an interview a while ago, Peter Relan is the real mastermind behind the growing Feint empire. Not only did he put the two together in an idea lab, but he's one of the driving forces behind the OpenFeint enterprise. Under his oversight, the Feint folks have swelled to become one of the major forces behind iPhone gaming (and thus, behind the iPhone's app ecosystem itself).

Netanel "Net" Jacobsson is a newer addition -- he's previously worked with Sony Ericsson on their mobile devices and Facebook on their own growing app empire, and now he's arrived at OpenFeint to help them use the lessons he's learned at the biggest online social networks around on their social software. Get the sense of how big this is yet? Relan, Jacobsen, and Citron all have pretty big ideas about where iPhone gaming is going, and as 3.0 comes down the pike and introduces a whole set of new features from Apple, they're in the best seat they can be in to do exactly what they want to do.

TUAW sat down with the three last week, and chatted about iPhone 3.0 and why it's such a big deal for developers, how they're going to approach microtransactions (carefully), and what's coming next for OpenFeint now that they've rounded up a whole stable full of developers implementing their backbone. Click "read more" to continue.

Welcome back to Mac 101, our series of posts aimed at novice Mac users and veterans who like the occasional refresher.

Mac OS X is equipped with a dictionary application that does pretty much what you'd expect, and a few things you might not. Here's how you can get the most out of Dictionary.

Most people use a dictionary to look up a word's definition. Doing so in Dictionary is pretty straightforward: Just launch the app, type your target term into the search field and hit return. That's all well and good, but not very interesting.

Here's what is. Click any word in the definition to find the meaning of that word. Do this just once, and an orange "Snap Back" icon appears in the search field. When clicked, it brings you back to your original search term.

Here's another cool trick. Let's say you looked up "Surname." Dictionary displays it broken up by syllable: "sur•name." If you highlight and copy it, it will paste as it should be written: "surname."

But wait, there's more! Highlight or position the cursor over a word in any Cocoa application (Safari, for example) and hit Control-Command-D. A small window appears that displays that word's definition and thesaurus alternative(s). If the term in question is the name of an Apple product, you'll see that product's official description from Apple. Clicking "More" at the bottom of this tiny window launches Dictionary.

Let's say you typically misspell a word that you have to type often (my Achilles' heel is "Twitterrific"). Simply right- or Control-click that word and select "Learn Spelling" to add it to Dictionary.

Dictionary is also more than a collection of definitions. You can quickly switch between a thesaurus, official descriptions of Apple products and Wikipedia. Additionally, select "Font/Back Matter" from the Go menu to access a slew of great information, like

• Proofreader's Marks
• The History of English
• Countries of the World
• Chemical Elements

Of course, every single word you find there can be clicked to reveal its definition. Finally, here's a bit of eye candy that isn't useful but still fun. You can browse every photo in Dictionary by navigating to

/Library/Dictionaries/New Oxford American Dictionary.dictionary/Contents/Images

and switching to Cover Flow view.

Despite all of the hoopla the last few days about TweetDeck becoming available for iPhone, I decided to stick with a tried and true friend -- Twittelator Pro. My loyalty was rewarded with a new version of the iPhone Twitter client that takes advantage of many of the features of iPhone OS 3.0.

Twittelator Pro 3.0 [App Store] is priced at US$4.99 for new users, and the upgrade is free for owners of previous versions. The app is from Andrew Stone's BigStonePhone, and builds upon capabilities of the new iPhone OS. Along with the existing features such as offline tweeting, a built-in browser, and being able to handle multiple Twitter accounts, Twittelator Pro 3.0 now adds the following goodies to 3.0 iPhones:

• Record, edit, and tweet video with the 3G S
• Record and tweet audio
• Copy, paste, select, select all, and undo text (shake to undo)
• Paste photos into tweets
• Compose and send email from within the app
• Get a zoomable map of a tweeter's location

My personal favorite feature is the built-in browser in Twittelator Pro, which keeps me in the app while I'm tapping on links. I've also been able to delete one other Twitter/geolocation app off of my iPhone thanks to the tweeter location maps.

Be sure to check out the gallery below for a plethora of pithy pictures of this great app.

Are you attending WWDC? Do you have a Mac desktop or iPhone app you'd like to show the world? Well join TUAW on June 11 at the Metreon (the big silver building right next door to the Moscone, where Jillian's is housed), where we'll have a camera ready for your close-up. We'll have a small table near the movie theater, next to the sunglasses shop -- look for this guy (me). I'll be there from 10am to 2pm PST.

So far we've seen some really good stuff here at WWDC, although we can't talk about some of it just yet. But if you show us your app, we'll put it on TUAW over the coming weeks.

Don't forget to follow tuaw_wwdc on Twitter for the latest on where we'll be, just in case you miss us tomorrow.

Google released a new tool for Mac users today. With Google Quick Search Box (QSB), you can perform searches of anything on your Mac or the Web with a few keystrokes. After downloading QSB, I installed it and gave it a test drive on my MacBook Air. After a short first look, I can say that QSB is going to be in constant use on my Macs.

The application takes up about 18 MB of space on your Mac hard disk, and once it is installed a small search box hovers on your screen (see above). You can toggle the presence of the box by pressing Control-Space Bar. The keyboard shortcut, as well as the appearance of the search box, can be customized in a very thorough preferences panel.

That's exactly the problem I ran into when Fishing Cactus asked us to review Equilibrio (click opens iTunes), their new ball puzzle game for iPhone and iPod touch. The app, which is also available for Nintendo Wii, is an addictive game in which you roll balls made of various materials (rock, paper, steel, rubber, and more) around a maze using the iPhone's accelerometers to control where the balls go. You can gain extra points by hitting "coins" and zipping to the end of the maze quickly. There is a conquest mode, where players need to complete a series of levels, as well as a challenge mode. The app is currently available in the App Store for half-price at US$1.99, and there's also a free version -- Equilibrio Lite -- available if you want to try before you buy.

Fishing Cactus has supplied us with 5 promo codes to give away to lucky iPhone / iPod touch owners in the US and Canada. To enter the giveaway, leave us a comment with your idea for a totally different material to make an Equilibrio ball out of.

Here are the rules and a link to the obligatory legal statement:

• Open to legal US residents of the 50 United States and the District of Columbia who are 18 and older. (Sorry, we know our international readers want to participate, but promo codes don't transfer outside the US.)
• To enter leave a comment with an idea for what material you think a Equilibrio ball should be made of.
  
• The comment must be left before Thursday, June 12, 05:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time.
• You may enter only once.
• Five winners will be selected in a random drawing.
• Prize: One license each for Equilibrio (US$1.99 value)
  
• Click Here for complete Official Rules.

Good luck! And check out the gallery below for some screenshots of this addictive iPhone game.

In the world of Mac telephony software, there's one leading product -- Parliant PhoneValet. Parliant today released version 6.0 of PhoneValet with some new features that make it even more attractive to small business owners. Those features include:

• Live receptionist -- Want to have a real person answer and direct calls? PhoneValet now allows a receptionist to perform those functions.
• Call out to deliver voice mail -- To keep employees in the loop when they're on the road, PhoneValet will call their cell phones to deliver important voice messages.
• Change greetings remotely -- Prior to version 6.0, PhoneValet users had to be sitting at a computer to record new outgoing voice mail greetings. Now they can do this from any phone.
• Mailbox privacy -- Messages for others on a shared PhoneValet server are now hidden.
• Network dialing -- Desktop dialing is now available to any PhoneValet or PhoneValet Anywhere user on the network.
• Shared phonebook / call log editing -- PhoneValet Anywhere users can now edit phonebook entries or trim call logs.

PhoneValet 6.0 is available for US$169.95, which includes a USB phone adapter, or to existing owners of PhoneValet for US$39.95. PhoneValet Anywhere, which allows users to access their PhoneValet messages from Windows PCs and iPhones among other features, is an available add-on for US$59.95.

The MacUpdate Promo Spring Bundle has been revealed, and it is, as the kids say, wicked (or sick, or whatever the kids say). This thing is packed with truly useful applications. If you were considering buying any one of these apps, the $49.99US pricetag makes the rest of them a high-value proposition.

There's been some controversy surrounding bundles of this type, but I believe that it's great exposure for developers, and I'm hoping that everyone's getting a fair cut. MacUpdate is my current favorite source for great software deals and they've been doing a great job of providing really useful, intrinsically valuable apps. This bundle is no exception.

I don't know much about the inner workings of bundle assembly, but I assume the bundle sponsor contacts developers and has some kind of engineered plan, even if it's just an inward bias toward certain genres of applications. Whereas the last MacHeist bundle had a somewhat "creative" bent, this MUpromo bundle has a definite technical angle, with a heavy dose of DVD ripping/remastering/viewing tools.

Read on for the list of included apps...

After my 1991 VW Vanagon camper ran out of gas late at night in the winter of 1994, and I had to walk four miles in bitterly cold weather to get enough fuel to start it up and drive back to the gas station, I decided to join the American Automobile Association (AAA). Since then, my AAA membership has provided jump-starts when a battery is dead and sent a locksmith when I locked my keys inside a car.

In addition to being a full-time Good Samaritan to members in need, AAA also does a great job of securing discounts on just about everything. Unfortunately, up to this point it's been almost impossible to figure out who offers discounts without referring to AAA's website.

AAA just made life a lot easier for iPhone owners with the new and free AAA DIscounts app (click opens iTunes). The app takes your current location, then displays a map with pins denoting businesses in the immediate area that provide AAA discounts. A tap on a pin brings up details about the discounts available, as well as an address and phone number. Tapping the phone number dials the number for you.

The app displays discount locations either in a list or on a map, and will provide point to point directions or a mapped route. If you're a AAA member, entering your membership number activates a special Roadside Assistance button that will not only call AAA, but provide the responder with your current location.

While this app still has a few bugs that need to be worked out (it kept telling me that it could not validate my membership number), it's a great start and a useful benefit for AAA members.