YABI: A smarter birthday calendar for iCal
YABI (“Yet Another Birthday Importer”) is an
iCal utility that aims to improve on the app’s built-in birthday calendar by making it smarter and more feature-rich.
It can import birthdays and anniversaries, display a person’s age in the title of the event it creates (handy!), and lets you add the lot to the calendar of your choice.
The app’s main window lets you select which of your contacts to include:
Click the Start button and it’s all done for you.
YABI’s preference pane, a nice slide-out drawer, allows other options to be set.
It can add a contact’s URL to the event, set the event to be all-day and lets you decide how many years of repeats to create.
You can also nominate how the name should be displayed and whether or not to add the contact’s age.
The Notification pane will either set no alert or use a configurable iCal message to let you know. I like to get emails for my alerts, but perhaps that being picky.
YABI is a universal binary and a beta. It is free at the moment, although may become shareware when the app is formally released.
You can get it from the developer’s web site 
(scroll down past NetLocation X).
Dates to iCal is another utility (donation-ware) that adds birthday and other event information to iCal. It features the email notification that is missing from YABI.
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Tags: anniversaries, birthdays, calendar, dates, events, iCal
December 9th, 2006 at 9:47 am
Hi Tim,
another option for getting anniversaries and birthdays into iCal is my ABtoiCal applescript, which you can get from http://kortenkamps.net/tiki-index.php?page=Mac+OS+X+Software . It’s not as full-featured like YABI, but it does the job. And if you know a little bit of Applescript, you can customize it yourself.
And of course: it’s free.
Ulli
December 9th, 2006 at 12:26 pm
Don’t download this! I just loaded it, added the birthdays to my iCal Work calendar and IT WIPED OUT ALL OF MY CALENDAR info! This is AWFUL!
December 9th, 2006 at 10:23 pm
“IT WIPED OUT ALL OF MY CALENDAR info! This is AWFUL!”
Thanks for the warning. But if you’re going to use version 0.41 software to muck around with your iCal calendar files without performing a simple backup, you really shouldn’t be complaining. Copying the Calendars folder to the desktop takes approximately 15 seconds.
December 12th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
I’m sorry for the incovenience caused to Rich, but I wrote that it’s still a beta everywhere, on the website, in the dmg.
Version 0.4.2 addresses that bug.
Chucky’s advice should be an habit of anyone who wants to try beta software.
Btw, thanks all for the support!!
Regards,
Ferruccio
February 17th, 2008 at 11:06 am
YABI doesn’t show the age in my calendar on my mac. It didn’t do much of anything. I wish they had a “Help” window
May 23rd, 2008 at 11:48 pm
Hi Gary,
did you selected “non recurrent” events?
If you upgraded to Leopard, please take a look at new YABI alpha version: http://www.devzero.it/YABI.html
Regards,
unixo