Creating iCal events with Quicksilver
There are lots of good ways to create iCal events and ToDos from Mail.app messages. I like to use MailTags for ToDos and Event Maker for events.
But even in the most email-focussed life, sometimes you need to make events and ToDos that are not related to an email.
Quicksilver offers at least two slick ways to deal with that quickly and efficiently.
The fastest way is provided by the Mac OS X Service, Calendar Creator. I’ve posted about Calendar Creator before. It’s great.
With the Services plugin installed in Quicksilver, creating an event is as easy as activating the interface, pressing the fullstop (or period) to access text mode, typing in something like “Coffee with Dicko next Tuesday, 10.30 am” and selcting “Add an event” from the action pane:
The “smart parsing” in Calendar Creator is an enormous time-saver. You can get this freeware Service from the developer’s web site 
.
A poster on the Quicksilver forums provides an AppleScript that offers another way to achieve the same thing. In fact, if you don’t use Quicksilver, it will launch just as happily from the Scripts menu or with a hotkey provided by an app like FastScripts .
Set it with a Quicksilver trigger and it presents you with a series of dialogs asking for the title, description (which goes in iCal’s Notes field), a date, start and end times and which calendar to use. This takes longer but gives you more control.
Similar Posts:
- Mail2iCal 1.5: Events, to-dos by AppleScript
- MenuCalendarClock: More menubar iCal
- A powerful new iCal action for Quicksilver
- GTD-style widget for iCal to-dos
- Do-It: Creating iCal Events Quickly
Tags: Apple Mail Tips, applescript, calendar creator, events, iCal, Productivity, quicksilver, Services, triggers
June 26th, 2006 at 6:05 am
What about the iCal Module plugin for Quicksilver? It adds two actions (one for creating Todos and another for Events) for acting on plain text in from the first pane. (Actually, from looking at your screenshot, you already have it installed.) It has the added benefit of offering a third pane for selecting which calendar to place the new Event/Todo in. Not to mention a much prettier iCal icon (not that I could do better, but the Calendar Creator icon is not so pleasing on the eye). The smart parsing in the Quicksilver plugin seems to be identical to that of Calendar Creator (the date and time are reliably entered, but no other fields, and the entire block of text is entered as a comment), but I didn’t exhaustively test it by any means.
June 26th, 2006 at 8:32 am
Whoops. Good point.
Either the iCal plugin has got smarter, or I am becoming demented. I clearly remember trying the iCal plugin and it not being as smart. But you’re right, it does seem to be as smart – smarter perhaps if you factor in the third pane.
August 3rd, 2006 at 5:26 am
Many thanks for the heads up. I was just trying Backpack calendar and was wishing for similar one-line, natural language entry for iCal.
I found the iCal module thanks to going to activate the services plugin after reading this post, and, having tried both of them, it appears just as smart. AND just as dumb. ;)
Which is to say:
1. Is there any syntax under which EITHER the iCal module or CalendarCreator.service removes the date info from the event name after it parses it?
2. Is there any way to indicate the DURATION or FINISH TIME of the activity when you are sending it through one of these services, or do I just have to enter that info manually by reading it in the event name later after it’s all in iCal?
Basically: I’m finding this PERFECT for quick capture, but I have to go into iCal later and edit everything to get it the way it needs to be. I’d love to just get it right the first time.
Anyone who’s been using these longer have any info?
August 3rd, 2006 at 4:03 pm
What a trip. I was messing around with this very concept completely randomly, and saw that events were being created (hey, cool!). Further playing (research?) demonstrated that QS was doing some parsing of the date and time based on what I entered. Very cool. Then I googled and came across this site, and you’re talking about this at the same time!
Anyway, I’ve dug a bit and found this: separate the date and time part with ‘ — ‘ (space, two dashes, space), and the text after the two dashes becomes your event text (or to-do text, I didn’t even get that far yet).
date and time — your event text
Events appear to be 1 hour in length by default. You can increase priority with added “!” preceding your event text.
I found this information in the QS reference wiki at http://docs.blacktree.com/quicksilver/plug-ins/ical
Terry
[non-sequitur - I'm so glad I switched, or added the Mac to my computer world]
August 3rd, 2006 at 11:12 pm
Thanks Terry- that syntax does indeed remove the additional info from the name of the event. Awesome! Still can’t do duration, but I can live with that…
August 4th, 2006 at 1:21 am
no worries – I’ve used this several times now.
Funny how a cool software feature just makes me feel good.
September 30th, 2006 at 7:27 pm
[...] Terry posted a comment today in an earlier Hawk Wings post about the formal syntax for creating iCal events and to-dos with the Quicksilver iCal plugin. It was news to me; it might be to you too. [...]
August 25th, 2008 at 5:51 pm
Aargh. The syntax doesn’t remove the info from the name of the event for me. I am getting seriously pissed that there is no good way to add events to iCal under 10.5 – the CalendarCreator service screws up the name, the Automator action has been broken since 10.5.2, and the Quicksilver iCal package doesn’t work under Leopard. I’ve spent far too many hours trying to figure this crap out.
September 22nd, 2009 at 3:35 am
I’ve been searching around : has no fix has ever been released to get QS + Ical in 10.5 ?