OS X Mavericks: The Missing Manual

Calendar

The calendar program that was called iCal for many years is now called Calendar, so that it matches up better with the iPhone and iPad.

Calendar is not so different from those “Hunks of the Midwest Police Stations” paper calendars that people leave hanging on the walls for months past their natural life span.

In Mavericks, Apple gave Calendar a thorough makeover. It’s no longer designed to look like it’s made of real-world materials—paper pages, leather binding, and so on. But it does pretty much the same stuff.

Tip

Calendar’s Dock icon displays today’s date—even when Calendar isn’t running.

For example, Calendar still offers several advantages over paper calendars:

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

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

• Calendar can share information with Contacts, with Mail, with your iPod/iPad/ iPhone, with other Macs, or with “published” calendars on the Internet. Some of these features require one of those iCloud accounts described in Chapter 17. But Calendar also works fine on a single Mac, even without an Internet connection.

• Calendar can subscribe to other people’s calendars. For example, you can subscribe to your spouse’s calendar, thereby finding out when you’ve been committed to after-dinner drinks on the night of the big game on TV. You can also tell Calendar to display your online calendars ...