Spanning Sync has finally released a public beta of its Google Calendar-iCal two-way sync app, only to experience so overwhelming a demand for new signups that the beta was closed again.

Spanning Sync is said to offer reliable bidirectional syncing of user-selected Calendars in iCal and Google’s calendar (see a previous Hawk Wings post).

The interface in the beta looks promising:

In a post that went up on the company’s blog soon after the announcement of the public beta, relief was promised for those eager to try out the service:

We’re thrilled (and a little freaked out) by the literally overwhelming response, but we want to make sure all of our users have the best experience possible. With any luck, the public beta will open again tomorrow, with a lot more capacity to handle the load. Thank you for your patience.

Keep your eyes peeled for the re-opening.

[Via TUAW ]

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I feel a bit sorry for Address Book. It sits in the background, chugging away and serving up contact details, but seldom gets the attention it deserves.

It doesn’t have a special day as iCal does (Wikipedia ). It doesn’t have a blog dedicated to it. Steve Jobs doesn’t wax lyrical about spending his day in it as he does with Mail.app.

To celebrate this quiet achiever, I am having a little Address Book Day of my own today.

First, five tips to help Address Book do its work better:

1. Creating iCal appointments from Address Book vCards. A quick drag and drop tip that saves time and typing. And is a clever example of iApp integration to boot.
2. Setting a default email address in Address Book. Help Address Book to know which email address is your preferred one for a particular contact (in a Group—as Yoram rightly points out in the comments).
3. A fistful of Address Book tips from Scott Kelby’s Mac OS X Tiger Killer Tips.
4. Tips on printing Address Book contacts.
5. Ed Eubank’s LowEndMac article on Supercharging Address Book offers some tips, uncovers ‘hidden features’ and suggests some great plugins to help you maximise Address Book’s usefulness.

The Hawk Wings Plugin and Addon List contains 22 extras, addons and utilities that make Address Book better.

Here are five that I particularly like:

1. BuddyPOP: Quick pop-up access to your Address Book Data. (See also the freeware but less-fully featured TapDex).
2. JABMenu: A menubar quick-access utility for Address Book.
3. Snail Mail: Beautiful envelopes and labels from Address Book.
4. MySync: Sync Address Book to many Macs without .Mac.
5. Plugins to integrate Address Book and Google Calendar.

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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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Mark Scrimshire has written two plugins for Address Book that automatically add information about a particular contact into a Google Calendar event.

As Mark explains :

The biggest drawback with Google Calendar has been the one-way limitation. I wanted to be able to easily add information to my calendar without having to re-type.

Installation is easy. Download Mark’s two scripts and install them in your ~/Library/Address Book Plug-ins folder.

Quit and relaunch Address Book, then Control-click on the phone or address tab or the contact you want to schedule a meeting with or call.

Select the “Create Call on Google for…” or “Create Google Meeting for… at…” option:

The script then pre-populates a Google Calendar event with phone numbers and addresses for the contact:

I can see how this would save a lot of time.

Google Calendar Add utility is donation-ware (USD 10 suggested) and is available from Mark’s web site .

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In the past year Hawk Wings has carried 91 posts about iCal.

The following are the five that I personally found most useful or interesting:

1. Create overlapping events in iCal more easily.
2. Adjusting visible iCal hours on the fly.
3. Get weather in Google Calendar, iCal.
4. Brainstorming an iCal-Mail.app mash-up.
5. iCalViewer: Streaming iCal onto your Desktop.

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The Google Calendar Welcome Page now notes that Safari is an offically supported browser.

It loads without any problems and all the drag ‘n’ drop and other slick features seem to work fine.

One thing I did notice: clashing events are rendered less clearly in Safari, where they lack the immediate visual clue of an overlap:

[Via TUAW ]

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