Slashdot Mirror
Apple Releases iCal
Freezebot writes, "Apple released his new iApp today, iCal. iCal is a calendar manager, which allows you to share your calendars online with your colleagues, family and friends, through your .Mac account.
It is a free download." It also works with any WebDAV server. Friendly Canuck adds, "However, iSync is nowhere to be seen. I thought the whole point of iCal was syncing with other devices. Oh well."
And when I read that, at first I thought of "Cal-Tech", you know, the school.
I wondered for a moment what Apple was doing holding Cal-Tech hostage. Hrm.
For us non-Mac people, we can still play with Mozilla Calendar
Objects in the blog are closer then they ap
I've been using ical since 1998.
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Does anybody know if this format is used somewhere else or even documented?
I think it is a nice touch from apple not required a
I was really hoping for iSync though, as I won't be able to really utilize iCal until the iSync beta is released later this month.
"The objective of securing the safety of Americans from crime and terror has been achieved." -- John Ashcroft
AFAIK iSync is in beta and will be available pretty much on schedule - end of september. I think Apple are using ical to push their .mac services for now rather than it's integration with iSync, which I'm sure will follow.
Arrrgh - not only did they leave out the feature I've been wishing for in a scheduling program, it looks like they almost put it in, but decided not to at the last minute.
I work nights, and I would kill for a program that would let me create events that, for example, start at 6:00 pm on one day, and end at 6:00 am on the next, without having to resort to the ugly hack of splitting the event into chunks, so it avoids that unbreakable midnight barrier.
I was excited when I saw the date box by the ending time when I created an event, but my hopes were dashed, when that box only became active for all day events...
I guess it's time to dig into the export format, and see what happens if I create an event that spans days manually, and try to import it...
Yes, end of September is the date they have on the iSync page.
isn't there an x application called ical (which has been around since 1993)?
US Citizen living abroad? Register to vote!
all in all i like ical although i'm not to happy about the speed. switching from week to month takes some time (3secs) on my 600 ibook. probably depending on the amount of dates...
does anyone know a webdav server for free ?
or how do i use that with my jagwire? like hosting my calendar myself ?
Does anyone know how I can turn my Mac OS 10.2 Apache instance (default install) running on my iMac into a WebDav server? I'd like to publish my calendar to my website without the .mac service.
Thanks in Advance
How about Tomcat? (http://jakarta.apache.org). While it's mostly used as for JavaServer Pages, it does have a WebDAV server and hey, the price is right.
does anyone know a webdav server for free ?
Yeah, there's an obscure one that you probably haven't heard of.
I can see it now -- your published vacation to Bermuda is an invite into your home to lowlifes.
I hold it, that a little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing. -- Thomas Jefferson
what i meant was a webdav provider
so that i could test out my ical-publish-feature
and see whether its usefull.
and no i don't have my own server running all the time.
hell, i just think it's cool that the icon shows the current date...i've been looking for an easy way to just look at my iBook and know what date it is
http://www.microsoft.com/office/ork/2000/five/70t3 _4.htm
This useful document explains how to configure an Exchange server to allow the publishing and searching of Free/Busy information, and how to configure Outlook clients to use the F/B information.
You could theoretically then configure iCal to use that same F/B publishing location -- at which point, iCal becomes a client for Outlook calendar sharing.
Not a bad thing, really, and certainly useful information to have around.
If you want to be able to view your iCal entries on your iPod, simply copy ~/Library/Calendars/* to /Volumes/(Name of iPod)/Calendars directory when your iPod is mounted up.
.ics files :)
No need to export all your calendars since it's just
is actually Caltech, but a few street signs around here have it as Cal Tech. As for the topic at hand, even though iSync isn't out yet, the web page is up here and they promise it will here in September. The apple news sites (spymac.com) say it should be available at the time of the Paris show.
We tried this at work today (got it at ~10am BST so plenty of tinkering time).
Outlook seems to be ok with simple events, but it barfed importing a repeating event with people attached.
Not sure whether it was attendees or repeating that caused the problem.
So you have to be careful iCal->Outlook. Reverse didn'tseem to cause any problems in our (limited) tests.
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
Move forward to February 17, 2003. According to iCal, Daylight Savings Time starts then.
Having a refresh period for subscribed calendars is a good thing, me thinks.
The apple bod at Expo told me end of the month for iSync. Greets from Paris.
Matt Thompson - Actuality - Insert product here.
what i meant was a webdav provider
.Mac account.
so that i could test out my ical-publish-feature
Get a
If you can't afford $99, you probably don't need iCal anyway.
Americans do enough work without also fetishizing it through a slick Aqua interface. As for sharing my calendar with my family and friends, well, we have this funny little habit of just being in the same places anyway.
I was at the keynote. Steve said that a beta of iSync would be out by the end of the month, and that they were looking for a release sometime around the end of the year.
What I want is the version of iTunes that knows about Rendezvous and adds everybody in the room's shared playlists to your iTunes playlists and can stream them on demand. They demoed that today, along with a bunch of other cool stuff. Steve also threw in a good measure of Windows bashing.
I did this as soon as I got my iPod and heard about iCal (order the iPod same week I heard about iCal).
However, for some reason Outlook at work has "When sending meeting requests over the Internet, use iCalendar format" disabled. Any idea why? I'd love to be able to send them to my Mac.com e-mail account and use that to get them onto my iPod.
mbbac
I'm afraid I know nothing about Outlook - someone else was doing the importing..
:-( I can help with xemacs tho' ;-)
Sorry
Slashdot looked deep within my soul and assigned
me a number based on the order in which I joined
Well, i think its a great idea.
;-)
.mac name), one service were I can put backups, calenders and my photogalleries. Sure, a bit pricy but usefull nonetheless. When I took pictures of some gig, they'll be online within 30minutes after I plug the camera in my powerbook. Complete with titles and editing.
I'm already using it to create a shared calender of the upcomings gigs my band has.
No HTML editing whatsoever. Fire up iCal, enter dates and publish.
And the fact that that calendar doesn't interfere with my personal calendar is very nice.
The sleek design of the calendars are very cool.
I can't wait untill we'll be using it at work
One app for ALL my (and my coworkers) calender needs is just excellent.
If i can sum up some advantages I have for my digital lifestyle since I use the Apple iApps and/or MacosX:
- iPhoto , one app to manage my library and export the pictures in nice galleries with a couple of clicks
- iCal , one app for ALL my calender needs. Anyone who has a browser can look at my schedules if they need to.
- iTools (i hate the
- Addressbook : one place for ALL my addresses, and soon it will be synced with my ericsson phone via bluetooth iSync (I use irDA for the moment)
In my opinion the "i" in iApp stands for "integration" and I like it very much. No "Internet Explorer/windows" integration but just "digital lifestyle-integration"
I know there are good alternatives on other OS's but they lack integration in my humble opinion.
blaah !
i don#t have to understand that logic, do i ?
I have iCal on my 10.2 Mac and Mozilla's calendar on a Win2k machine. Out of the box, they don't seem to want to read each other's .ics files. Opening them in a text editor shows they're both plain text and quite similar. Short of writing my own parser/translater in Perl or PHP, does anyone know how to get them to play well together?
In other news, http://www.apple.com/ical/library/ is a pretty sweet page. Just as a mailto: link opens your mail client with the proper info in place, they have webcal:// links that automatically open in iCal. nice.
my only problem with ical so far is the grey they use to show selected dates is sooooo close to white.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
is there a way to import birthdates into ical ?
if not has anyone written a script or something.
i was pretty dissapointet when import feature from addressbook didn't get the birthdates from my palm file.
I love the app, don't get me wrong, but it's still beta quality. The UI is horribly slow, everything from resizing the window to unchecking the calendars. I've had UI elemtents dissappear on me. It wont import from apples addressbook (this is supposed to be a system wide database, apple isn't using it, why would anyone else?). It doesn't import entourage holidays, but it does import the other info. Why would that be? Seems overly selective.
The subscribe feature is still not user friendly. The average Joe is supposed to know to use webcal:// before each address? I didn't know you could subscribe to holidays, i had to find that in a maccentral forum post. This should have been an option in the drop down menu.
They rushed this out the door. I just hope 2.0 isn't far off. In the meantime I'll use it unless I find something better.
and is missing some features.
:-)
bugs:
cannot scroll the day or week views
alarms don't alarm if iCal not running
email alarms require a validation in mail app when they are sent. what good is that if you are sitting in front of your computer?
events force you to think in military time. it is an error just waiting to happen for those of us who think AM/PM
missing features
if an event is not within view, ie scrolled away, you don't know it is there. since there is no scrolling, you can't see alarms that are before the start of your day or after the end of your day
can't cut/copy/paste events. how utterly poor of apple not to include a feature that has been a hallmark of apple software since 1984. Apple must have laid off all their QA staff.
should be able to chose am/pm or 24 hour time.
... or can it not even read iCalendar attachments in Mail ??
syncing of their iCal with an apache web server or some such?
I'd be curious to hear
or, um, would a cheap hack just to be to ftp it over...hrm...
If you need iCal, that probably means you have stuff to keep track of. Meetings, appointments, soccer practice, whatever. If you have all that stuff, then you can almost certainly part with a hundred lousy bucks. If you can't afford a hundred bucks, then chances are the only thing in your calendar is "clean belly button" anyway.
Hello world,
Has anyone noticed that when using iCal to invite other individuals to events (say meetings), Mail immediately reports the following warning:
Huh? That strikes me, at least, as rather omninous. Especially as responding to the meeting invitations you receive results in the same warning.This seems like a very tempting spot for a trojan horse or some other such spoof. Thoughts?
Monkey hate technology Robot hate the monkey They will fight eternally -- James Kolchaka
... and over at MacSlash there are instructions on enabling WebDav on Apache on the Mac.
Like "OS 9" and "X", "ical" already has a well-established meaning: ical is the name of a venerable UNIX calendaring program, still in pretty wide use. It would be nice if Apple were a bit more sensitive to other people's software products, be they commercial or free.
Apple laptops are effectively unusable for unix users.
I am a long-time Unix user. That means I need to have the Ctrl key to the left of the A key. This is a genuine need , not merely a want; it is based upon ergonomics. The Ctrl key is heavily used in unix, and it must be easily accessable. It cannot be off in the lower left corner of the keyboard where it is difficult to get at, and where it distorts the position of your left hand such that you can't easily type other keys while holding the Ctrl key down.
Apple desktop keyboards are now all USB. They are all OK. The CapsLock key can be re-mapped into a Ctrl key.
Unfortunately, even in this modern age, all Apple laptops have built-in ADB keyboards. The ADB keyboard is broken-by-design. It is, in general, not possible to remap the CapsLock key into a Ctrl key.
There are some exceptions, but they are horrible kludges. They are horrible kludges because the original design of the ADB keyboard was a horrible kludge. The correct solution would be for Apple to re-design their laptop motherboards to use built-in USB keyboards. This hasn't happened yet. If you run Linux, use Debian's solution. For Mac OS X users, uControl works. There are no solutions (that I know of) for either NetBSD or OpenBSD. Please note once again that the "solutions" above are in fact kludges, because of the original bad design of the ADB keyboard.
Apple is (currently) ignoring Unix users! This is not merely speculation on my part. In an on-going email exchange I am having with an Apple employee (whom I won't name) in their marketing department, the Apple marketing person directly stated to me that Apple was catering to their historic Mac customers, and is purposely ignoring the Unix market. He also claimed that Apple would soon start paying more attention to the Unix market. I won't hold my breath. Apple has been ignoring Unix users for more than 10 years. I expect that trend to continue. (Also note that my Apple contact indicated that Macs would never ship with a 3-button mouse, even though Apple intended to port almost all X-window software and deliver it either on a CD/DVD or installed directly on each Mac's hard drive. How Unix friendly is a 1-button mouse with X programs that often require 3 buttons?)
Apple has now lost two opportunities to sell me hardware. I really wanted an Apple laptop for their superior battery life, and for the PowerPC with Altivec CPU. (The Altivec is vastly superior to the x86 line for DSP.) Because I can't live with the broken-by-design built-in ADB keyboard in all Apple laptops, Sony and IBM sold me laptops instead. If Apple fixes this problem, they will sell me a PowerBook next year; if they don't, I'll still be running OpenBSD on x86 hardware, and wishing I could use a Mac.