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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."
Does anybody know if this format is used somewhere else or even documented?
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...
does anyone know a webdav server for free ?
Yeah, there's an obscure one that you probably haven't heard of.
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
Ummm... I think you're missing the point. It's not just for other people to a "admire", it's for them to use. You can have a shared calendar that other people subscribe to for their scheduling. For example, one soccer mom can make up the master carpooling schedule, and all the other soccer moms in her group can subscribe to the published version. Or you can publish all of your indie band's concert dates, so all your groupies can be sure to attend. I'm sure you can think of lots of examples where groups of people share a common event calendar.
It's a way to publish a single calendar to lots of people at the same time, and have it integrate into their iCal seamlessly. Maybe you won't have a use for it, but I sure do.
In any field, find the strangest thing and then explore it. -John Archibald Wheeler
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 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.
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