Want to synchronize your iCal events and ToDos on more than one Mac but don’t have a .Mac account? iSynCal does the job.

Using the Apple File Sharing feature built into OS X, iSynCal synchronizes events and todo from iCal calendars between two or more Mac computers. It can also synchronize calendars with an iPod or between multiple users on the same Mac.

A scheduling feature allows for automated synchronizations. A screenshot of the app’s mail window gives a good sense of the way it works:

It is also possible to schedule the synchronizations.

iSynCal was updated two days ago. The new version fixes a number of bugs including one that corrupted synched ToDos. It now also synchronizes iCal Alarms and Notes.

iSynCAl works on 10.2+, is shareware (USD 25) and is available from the developer’s web site.

UPDATE: New version (5.4) released, 9 December 2005.

This week saw more tips than plug-ins and helpful apps. Still, I’ve added Snail Mail and addressbook2pine to the new Address Book section and George Sudarkoff’s “Announce Sender” AppleScript to the Added Functionality section.

The Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List now contains 81 plug-ins, add-ons, AppleScripts and helpful apps for Mail.app users.

Over the past fortnight, the five most popular stories were:

• An interface hack too far? — Changing Apple Mail’s Interface icons.
• Switching from Thunderbird to Apple Mail — and vice versa.
• Getting Things Done in Apple Mail — Setting up Apple Mail for GTD.
• Change Apple Mail’s Dock icon — Instructions for changing Mail.app‘s stamp icon in the Dock.
• 139 different Apple Mail icons — Replacement icons for Apple Mail‘s red-tailed hawk.

Over the past few days, I have been reorganising my rules in Mail.app to match some new server arrangements and as part of grappling with Getting Things Done.

In the process, I drove myself crazy and discovered something about rules and IMAP folders that I never knew before.

In the Rules pane of Apple Mail‘s Preferences, the drop-down menu for selecting which mailbox a rule should move or copy an email to will only show the IMAP mailboxes that are visible in the Mailbox Drawer.

So, a Mailbox Drawer in the state on the left produces a Rules drop-down menu like the one of the right:

I must have spent two hours trying to get the sub-folders in the Trinity IMAP account to display in the rule drop-down menu so that I could select one of them. It would be too embarrassing to go through all the things I did in the hope that it would fix it.

In fact, as I discovered by accident, all I had to do was expand the mailbox tree in the Mailbox Drawer. Then all the IMAP mailboxes are available for selecting in the Rules menu:

I can’t believe I didn’t know that. I can’t believe how much time I wasted.

Addressbook2pine is a freeware app that converts Address Book contacts into the tab delimited .addressbook format used by pine.

During the conversion Address Book’s fields are mapped into the pine addressbook as follows:

It can also convert the other way, importing contacts from pine’s addressbook into OS X’s Address Book.

The app’s preference pane contains a number of options that make the process more flexible. For example you can customize the way nicknames are handled or how email IDs are applied:

The app is freeware although the author accepts donations and is available from the developer’s web site.

Textpander has been updated with some nifty new features.

This time-saving (and finger-saving) utility stores snippets of text and images that you can insert in your typing with user-defined shortcuts. It’s one of my favorite OS X add-ons and saves me lots of time in Apple Mail and elsewhere.

The updated version features as new variable (%clipboard) allowing you to insert whatever is in the Clipboard into your snippets. Sweet.

It now imports snippets from other apps better and works more smoothly with Nisus Writer nlang files. Panther users will be pleased to learn that it now works in 10.3.9 as well. The version also adds French and German localizations.

You can get the updated version from the developer’s web site.

My work has just set up external access to its IMAP server, so that I can work as easily from home as the office. Excellent.

The external access is secured with a self-signed SSL certificate. Unless you import the certificate into your Keychain you get endless annoying error messages. And importing it wasn’t as easy as you might expect.

In the end, I offered to write up a walk-through for other Mac users in the College, and I’m posting it here too. It’s all documented in Apple Mail‘s help file under “I’m getting a certificate-related error message” but visual learners will appreciate the pictures.

How to accept a self-signed SSL certificate in Mail.app permanently (with screenshots) after the jump.

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No doubt he has many fine achievements, but Joe Kissell is also the only person ever to have published a book dedicated to Apple Mail, Take Control of Apple Mail. On Hawk Wings that makes him the USA’s greatest living writer ;-)

In a blog entry on his life as a freelance writer, he mentions that the next version of that book, Take Control of Apple Mail in Tiger, is almost ready for publication (or at least, “ebookhood” as he puts it).