Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Second Edition

iCal and iSync

To further build up its collection of Mac OS X-only “i-apps”—and to help promote its $100-per-year .Mac services—Apple unveiled iCal, the company’s first calendar program, in July 2002. (If your copy of Mac OS X didn’t come with iCal, you can download it from the Apple Web site.)

In many ways, iCal is not so different from those “Hunks of the Midwest Police Stations” paper calendars we leave hanging on our walls for months past their natural life span. But iCal offers several advantages over paper calendars. For example:

• It can automate the process of entering repeating events, such as weekly staff meetings or gym workout dates.

• iCal can give you a gentle nudge (with a sound, a dialog box, or even an email) when an important appointment is approaching.

• iCal can share information with your Address Book program, with Mail, with your iPod, with other Macs, with “published” calendars on the Internet, or with a Palm organizer. Some of these features require one of those .Mac accounts described in Chapter 18, and some require iSync (described at the end of this chapter). But iCal also works just fine on a single Mac, even without an Internet connection.

Working with Views

When you open iCal, you see something like Figure 20-15. By clicking one of the View buttons on the bottom edge of the calendar, you can switch among any of these views:

• Day shows the appointments for a single day in the main calendar area, broken down by time slot.

  If you choose iCal→Preferences, in fact, you ...