Five addons to make iCal even better
Today is ‘iCal Day”, the date displayed by default on the iCal icon.
To celebrate, I offer you a list of great add-ons or utilities that extend iCal’s ability to organise your life, with links to past Hawk Wings reviews:
Widgets
If you like widgets, DoBeDo is a great way to stay on top of your to-dos.
Highly customizable, it displays to-dos, allows you to add them, mark them completed and print them out. It comes with enough skins to please everyone:
Freeware. Get it from the developer’s web site 
.
Menubar utilities
High Priority gets my vote over MenuCalendarClock, not only because it is a third of the price, but also because it offers more flexible ways of managing your to-dos from the menubar. (Alhough, in fairness, if you shell out the USD 18.95 for MenuCalendarClock, you get a utility that displays events as well).
It allows you to sort your to-dos by Calendar, Due Date, Priority, Status or Title and to toggle the display of priority icons. You can use it as freeware but need to register to create to-dos. Shareware (USD 6). Get it from the developer’s web site .
Integration with Mail.app
I confess. My heart belongs to MailTags .
If it didn’t, or if MailTags’s other features aren’t important to you, nothing better integrates Mail.app and your email with iCal than Event Maker. It quickly creates normal or all-day events and to-dos from a selected message. It’s donation-ware and available from MacUpdate .
Alarms
iCal’s rich suite of alarm options is great, but it’s a pain to create them manually for each event. iCalFix 0.3 offers customizable automatic alarms for iCal, making it easy to get reminded, even if you forget to set an alarm manually. It’s donation-ware and available from Robert’s web site . (See also the shareware solution, iCal-alarmist).
Backup
Many people understand the importance of backing up their email, but don’t extend the same precautions to their iCal data.
Following an unfortunate incident with his mobile phone, Nick at Socklabs has written an AppleScript that will create backups of your iCal and Address Book data into a new folder. It also tars and gzips them and then pushes the backup to a remote host.
Of course, there are plenty more iCal utilities in the Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List.
Tags: addons, alarms, Apple Mail, backup, iCal, ical day, integration, mail.app, menubar, widgetsRelated posts
July 17th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
I’d like to mention some more extensions to spice it up a little:
Amnesty Widget Browser allows you to put Widgets on the desktop. I have DoBeDo along with the iCal Events widget (the red theme of DoBeDo matches iCal Events’ theme perfetly) on my desktop, and I don’t want to use my Mac without it anymore. ;)
There’s a hint in the cocoaforge forums on how to enable Growl notifications from iCal events. It requires some modifications within the application - but it’s easy going. Highly recommended!
July 18th, 2006 at 1:28 am
great post. you did not say this explicitly but wouldn’t today also be iCal’s birthday? of course, er, we don’t celebrate the birthday of programs do we. that would be silly.
July 18th, 2006 at 1:41 am
By pure coincindence (honestly! I didn’t plan this!), there’s a new version of iCalFix just today. Head over to http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2006/07/17/icalfix-05-universal-binary if you’d like to have a non-SIMBL version with a real preferences pane as universal binary.
How’s that for a birthday present, iCal?
July 18th, 2006 at 4:29 am
Excellent! Deserves a post of its own to wet the baby’s head.
September 26th, 2006 at 10:20 pm
[...] It adds another skin (or theme) to the existing options, a wide format that matches the Calendar widget (pictured). [...]