Mac OS X Power Hound, Second Edition

Chapter 10. The Other iApps

Sure, iTunes and iPhoto may be the Big iKahunas as far as hints are concerned...but it takes a whole iVillage of iApps to make a digital hub. The rest—iCal (for tracking appointments and events), iChat (for online conversations), iMovie (for digital movie-making), and iDVD (for producing DVDs on SuperDrive machines)—have a few tricks up their respective sleeves as well.

iCal

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.

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

• Share information with your Address Book program, Mail, your iPod, other Macs, calendars on the Internet, or a Palm organizer. Some of these features require a $100-per-year .Mac account, while others simply require iSync. But many iCal features work just fine on a single Mac, even without an Internet connection.

Multiline Entries

When you type in a new calendar entry—what iCal calls an event—and then press Return, the program adds it to your calendar. Let’s say you want your event to appear on multiple lines, though, as shown in Figure 10-1. What then?

View Any Number of Days at Once

iCal seems to offer three distinct views, which you can select by clicking the appropriate button below the calendar: Day, Week, and Month. In reality, though, there are additional views, available only through a set of ...