Switching to the Mac: The Missing Manual, Lion Edition

iCal

In many ways, iCal is not so different from those “Hunks of the Midwest Police Stations” paper calendars people leave hanging on the walls for months past their natural life span. In fact, in the Lion extreme makeover of iCal, it looks more than ever like a physical calendar.

Tip

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

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 workouts.

• 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 or iPhone, with other Macs, or with “published” calendars on the Internet. Some of these features require one of those iCloud accounts described in Chapter 10. But iCal also works fine on a single Mac, even without an Internet connection.

• iCal 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 iCal to display your online calendars from Google and Yahoo, or even your company’s Exchange calendar.

Working with Views

When you open iCal, you see something like Figure 16-5. By clicking one of the View buttons above the calendar, or by pressing -1, -2, -3, or -4, you can switch among these views: ...