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iCal please stop setting my appointments to all day

Matt — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:50:08 +0000

iCal Enter new meeting in month view

iCal Automatically adjusted the time of my meeting after I put the time in the Description

Lion’s iCal changes default behavior of the new event creation in Month View and creates all day events by default. This is one of the most annoying bugs in Lion. But it is really not a bug. I learned today that if you type the name of your meeting and the start time; it will make the new event, set the time, and default the duration to 1 hour. For example, in month view, double click the date you want the appointment to be on. Then type “Meeting Information at 3p”. (There is no need to use “at” if you don’t want to)

iCal will set the appointment on the date at 3pm lasting to 4pm with the description of “Meeting Information”

If you want to change the default duration of the event that iCal sets you can do so by using a terminal command.

Open terminal and use the following command. Notice the “15″ at the end, edit that to be the time in minutes you want to be the default.

defaults write com.apple.iCal 'Default duration in minutes for new event' 15

So if I want my default meetings to be 1 and 1/2 hours then I need to edit the code to end in 90.

I hope this helps some of you with the new iCal and making it more user friendly.

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Hide less-important alarmed reminder events in iCal

Matt — Sun, 29 Nov 2009 19:33:34 +0000

iCal’s alarms come in handy for those of us who tend to forget the various little things we always need to do. However, you may find iCal getting cluttered with such regularly-scheduled events, pushing other events out of view. But there’s a simple solution to this problem.

Go to File » New Calendar » On My Mac, and name the new calendar Reminders or something similar. Put all of your reminders in this calendar, and make sure they all have alarms. Then, simply click on the checkbox next to the Reminder calendar in the sidebar to hide the calendar. Alarms for the hidden calendar will still go off, but all your miscellaneous reminders will no longer clutter your iCal window. (This “hide in other calendars” strategy is useful for other things as well.)

Via Mac os X hints

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Do you need to get rid of Duplicate iCal Items?

Matt — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 16:48:03 +0000

After testing out Plaxo and a few other iCal Syncing tools I have a few extra iCal events in my Calendar. I really did not want to sit and delete all the duplicates. I stumbled across this utility that takes care of it for me. John Maisey had written an apple script that looks through the ical and gets rid of the Duplicates. He has mad both a Leopard and a Tiger Version. Check out his site for the download.

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Quickly Change the Event Title in iCal

Matt — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 14:19:28 +0000

If you Option-double click an event in your iCal calendar, it highlights the event’s title immediately and lets you edit it, without bringing up the pop-up window. Not necessarily faster, but less intrusive.

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Add calendar events on your iPod touch

Matt — Fri, 12 Oct 2007 03:21:36 +0000

Apple disabled calendar events. You can re-enable them. You need a jailbroken iPod touch and a text editor. Add two lines to a property list file and you can start adding events on your touch.

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Set iCal To Send You A Text Message For Your Reminder

Matt — Mon, 10 Sep 2007 02:37:19 +0000

Over at Lifehacker.com they describe setting up iCal you text you with your reminders. This will really work well for someone who leaves your computer on all the time. Give this a try and tell us what you think.
First you have to make sure that you text e-mail is in Address Book. I am not sure what the domain is for anyones wireless provider except for Verizon. If you have Verizon then it is you 10 digit phone number @vztext.com.

Next set up the appointment you want iCal to text you about.
In the reminder field set it to e-mail and then select the mobile phone text address.
Set the time before and then you are set. iCal will send you a text.

WARNING: If you don’t have a text plan with you wireless carrier then you will have to pay for text messages.

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Unique ways to use URLs in iCal

Matt — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 00:48:30 +0000

While i was looking for some topics for todays post i came across this nice article by Rob Griffiths over at Mac World.

In iCal, you can assign a URL to an event or to-do—just fill in the obviously-named URL field when creating your new event or to-do, and you’ll wind up with a link you can use to jump to that URL from within that event. But you can also create events or to-do’s that have a click-able link as their actual title.

There are a few ways to do this. You can drag a URL from your browser’s address bar directly into iCal, for instance, and iCal will create a new event with that URL as its title. When you click this event’s title in iCal, you’ll be switched to your browser and the specified URL will load. (If you use Month view, you might think it’s now impossible to edit this event, as anywhere you click seems to take you to your browser. If you switch back to iCal, though, you’ll find the event is selected and ready for editing. You can also click in any white space next to the URL in the Month view to edit it without activating the URL.)

You can also create your own hyperlinked events and to-dos; just type the URL in angle brackets as part of the item’s title. For instance, something like this: Meet with Apple . After you finalize the event or to-do, you’ll see that the URL portion of the title works as a clickable link, while the text outside the angle brackets does not. While you wouldn’t want to use a super-long URL for a clickable link, you might find this useful if you have Web-related events and/or to-dos. (You could always use TinyURL.com to shrink ultra-long URLs.)

Finally, here’s a use of URLs in iCal that you may never have considered: You can link to local files (nearly) as easily as you can link to a remote Web page. So if you have a document that you need to work on for a to-do, or a saved party invitation for an upcoming event, you can link to those documents directly from your iCal event. The easiest way to do this is to use pretty much any browser other than Safari (I tested Camino, Firefox, and OmniWeb) to locate your local file.

Assuming the document you wish to link to is somewhere in your user’s folder, enter this URL in your (non-Safari) browser: file:///Users/username (yes, three slashes after file). Replace username with your user’s short username, then press Return to load the URL. The file URL points to your local machine, not the internet, so you should be looking at a page showing the content’s of your user’s home folder.

(The reason you can’t use Safari is that Safari now uses the Finder to open file:// URLs, instead of displaying a navigable directory view in the browser window.)

Now navigate into Documents, or wherever you stored your file, until you can see the file of interest on the screen. Control-click on the file and choose Copy Link Location (or Copy URL or whatever your browser calls it). Switch back to iCal, create your event or to-do, and then select the URL field and press Command-V to paste the copied URL into that field. (You can also drag-and-drop the URL from the browser’s address bar if you want a folder’s URL—you can’t get a file’s URL in the address bar, because when you click a file in your browser, the browser will probably download it.)

Once the URL is visible, click on it and choose Open URL. If you specified a file, it should open in its usual application. If you specified a folder, that folder will open in the Finder. Keeping a link to a local file with the event or to-do makes it super-simple to access the files related to that event or to-do.

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Publishing your calendars without .Mac!

Matt — Thu, 31 May 2007 15:17:38 +0000

I was looking through the arcives at A New Mac Tip Every Day and Came Across this.

I have to admit that being able to share calendars between Macs was really one of the features that convinced me to get .Mac. .Mac is great, but it is pricey for what it offers especially if you are not interested in every features included in the package. There is a pretty cool website that offers the service of web published and shared calendars free. It is called iCal Exchange. To publish and share your calendars from iCal:
1. Go to http://www.icalx.com/
2. Choose “Create an account” in the right sidebar.
3. Follow the instructions to open a free account.
4. Once your account is created, you can login to get the URL to publish to. The URL should be http://icalx.com/private/accountname/ for private calendars or http://icalx.com/public/accountname/ for public calendars.
5. Now you are ready to go to iCal.
6. In iCal, select the calendar you want to publish at the left.
7. Go to “Calendar” and choose “Publish”.
8. For “Publish on”, choose “a Private Server”.
9. Paste the URL in the “Base URL” field.
10. Enter you login and password for iCal Exchange.
11. Check “Publish changes automatically”.
12. Click on “Publish”.
13. It will display “Calendar Published”.

You calendar is now on the Web. To get it on another Mac:

1. Copy the URL iCal gave you when it displayed “Calendar Published”.
2. In iCal (on your other Mac), go to “Calendar” and choose “Subscribe”.
3. Paste the URL of your published calendar.

You are done! You now have a .Mac like way of sharing your calendars between Macs and accessing them on the Web!

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