iPod and iTunes: The Missing Manual, Third Edition

Calendars from iCal (Macintosh)

If you record your life in iCal, Apple’s free desktop calendar program for Mac OS X, you’re in luck. Perhaps not surprisingly, the iPod has an excellent rapport with its i-named sibling.

The Easy Way

Getting your iCal calendar onto the iPod is simple: you just use Apple’s free iSync program, exactly as described in Chapter 11. It automatically synchronizes and updates complete iCal calendars between the Macintosh and the iPod. (In iCal lingo, a calendar is one category, or set, of appointments. You might have three, called Home, Work, and Rotary Club—or Dad, Mom, and Deb. iCal color-codes your appointments to show what calendar they belong to, as shown in Figure 9-1.)

The beauty of this system is that iSync will keep your iPod updated each time you connect it.

Tip

If your iPod is a 2003 or later model, iSync can send your iCal To Do list items (Figure 9-2) to the iPod, too. Once you’ve synced up, spin your scroll wheel to Extras → Calendars → To Do and see what you’re supposed to get done today.

The Manual Way

If you want to load just a single calendar category onto the iPod, you can manually move it without using iSync. To do so, click the category in the Calendars list at the left side of the iCal window, and then choose File → Export. Name the calendar file and save it someplace easy to get to, like your desktop. The exported calendar file’s name has .ics at the end.

Figure 9-1. The iCal main window lets you see your life at a glance in several panes, ...