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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."
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...
Gee, who's more of a whiny bitch, the person providing factual data or the person who is bitching about the information because they don't like it? Hm. Gee.
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.
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.