Mac OS X: The Missing Manual, Panther Edition

iCal

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 later in 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 20-10. 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 can specify what hours constitute workday. This is ideal both for those annoying power-life people who get up at a.m. for two hours of calisthenics, and for the more reasonable people who sleep until 11 a.m. before rolling out of bed and heading over to the home office in the den. This same dialog ...