iPod & iTunes: The Missing Manual, Second 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 10. 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 Chris. iCal color-codes your appointments to show what calendar they belong to, as shown in Figure 8-1.)

Figure 8-1. The iCal main window lets you see your life at a glance in several panes, in addition to a main window where you can display events by the day, week, or month. In the Calendars pane, you can create several color-coded calendars for different needs or family members; view coming months in the pane below. The To Do list pane lets you set up a list and check off completed tasks. In the search pane at bottom, you can seek and find specific events.

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 8-2) to the iPod, too. Once you’ve synced up, spin ...