Hawk Wings » Calendars

iCal Dupe Deleter rips through iCal Duplicates with style

Tim Gaden — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 12:42:30 +0000

John Maisey (it’s John Maisey Day here at Hawk Wings) has also spruced up his applescript for deleting duplicates in iCal.

I’ve just moved to all my calendars to Zimbra’s CalDAV service, and even with every imaginable backup and every care, I ended up with duplicates all over the place.

iCal Dupe Deleter came to the rescue. It is now packaged inside a slick interface that offers more options and control over the deletion process:

It lists the available calendars and offers you the option to test it for duplicates before doing anything drastic.

iCal Dupe Deleter is Leopard-only, although John continues to provide earlier versions of the applescript that work on Tiger along with the new Leopard version on his web site . It is donation-ware.

There are lots of other good scripts there too. ical, duplicates, dupes, caldav, applescript, productivity, appointments, calendarsSimilar Posts:

iCal Duplicates Script updated for Leopard

Tim Gaden — Tue, 25 Dec 2007 00:49:21 +0000

John Maisey has updated his AppleScript for deleting duplicates in iCal, so that it works with Leopard.

Syncing and sharing calendars often produces duplicates. Removing them manually is a pain. John’s script makes it easy.

When you run it, it will prompt you to select which of your calendars you want to clean up:

Then is does its business quietly in the background, popping the result when it is done:

One note of warning. It doesn’t offer you a second chance or an option to review the deletions. Once you select the calendar and tell it to clean up, that’s exactly what it does.

So, back up your calendar data first, using the File > Backup iCal menu option.

Delete iCal Duplicates is freeware (donations not refused) is available, along with some other interesting scripts for iCal and Address Book, from John’s web site ical, duplicates, events, productivity, calendars, applescript, leopard.Similar Posts:

GTD-style widget for iCal to-dos

Tim Gaden — Mon, 19 Feb 2007 11:58:11 +0000

ConceptDraw Lab has produced a little Dashboard widget that “partially implements Getting Things Done” by allowing for the quick creation of iCal to-dos without the need to open iCal.

It works by presenting each calendar in iCal as an Inbox, which can be selected from a drop-down menu at the top of the widget.

Entering text then creates to-dos attached to the selected calendar.

In the Next Events view, it displays all events scheduled for today.

Despite my normal charitable outlook, I struggled to see how this would gain a place in someone’s GTD toolbox.

Event Maker remains the tool of choice for creating iCal events and to-dos for those not using MailTags or Quicksilver (one, two Hawk Wings post on Quicksilver and iCal) to do the same job.

For power and ease of use Event Maker is hard to beat.

Perhaps I am becoming a “Productivity snob”. It’s not always about power. For some people this might be just the ticket and serve as an excellent bucket for collecting things to do.

GTD widget for iCal is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .ical, to-do, events, calendars, GTD, getting things done, not apple mail, quicksilver, productivity, widgets, dashboardSimilar Posts:

Scalp: Share iCal over FTP, SSH or SFTP

Tim Gaden — Thu, 15 Jun 2006 15:11:52 +0000

Scalp is a bundle for iCal that enables the sharing of calendars over FTP, SSH or SFTP connections.

The developer created it, he explains, “because .Mac is expensive and WebDAV can be hard to come by”.

It depends on SIMBL (Smart InputManager Bundle Loader), the same Cocoa application hack that powers the Safari plug-in PithHelmet , iAlert and other useful apps. A copy of SIMBL in included in the disk image and must be installed first.

Full instructions on how to install and run the app (some fiddling with URLs is required) are included in the disk image as well. Note especially the known bugs section.

The hack, which only works with iCal 2.0.3, gets its name from “the unfortunate result” of combining cal and scp, the SSH copy command.

Donations from grateful Scalp users are not refused by the developer. You can get Scalp from his web site .ical, ftp, sftp, ssh, calendars, sharing, weddav, .Mac, dotmac, hacks, SIMBLSimilar Posts:

The World Cup and iCal

Tim Gaden — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 12:01:00 +0000

There is now less than one day to go until the World Cup kicks off, so it’s time to mention a slick way of following “the World Game” with iCal to make sure you never miss a match.

Pre-made iCal calendars abound (search for “World Cup” at icalshare.com), but World Cup Kickoff offers you the ability to roll your own iCal calendar, which you can then import into iCal.

You can choose to follow a whole Group or just a particular team (or two, if you are hedging your bets). It knows about your time zone too.

Aussie, Aussie, Aussie. Oi! Oi! Oi!ical, world cup, calendars, soccer, footballSimilar Posts:

CalTalk: Sharing calendars over Bonjour

Tim Gaden — Thu, 04 May 2006 12:30:21 +0000

CalTalk is a helpful app that enables the sharing of iCal calendars over a local network using the Bonjour protocol built into Mac OS X 10.

You can share iPhoto and iTunes like this out of the box.

CalTalk lets you add iCal to the list, just as Address-o-Matic adds the same option for Address Book.

After launch, the app resents you with a window containing two panes:

The second window allows you specify which calendars to share.

The first window shows you your network and the available users. Mine’s blank because my Mac is on the only computer in the house that is switched on.

A Preferences window allows you set further options, including which port you want to use, security settings and so on.

CalTalk is donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .ical, sharing, calendars, bonjour, network, address bookSimilar Posts:

Google Calendar and iCal Tutorial

Tim Gaden — Fri, 14 Apr 2006 03:11:32 +0000

I guess that everyone on the planet now knows that Google has launched its CL2 web-based calendar.

Scott McNulty at TUAW has written an illustrated tutorial on how to share a calendar from Google Calendar with iCal.

It’s read-only subscription in iCal at the moment, but better integration will soon come.

Just don’t try it in Safari:

For the moment you’ll need to use Firefox (or one of that crowd) to get the best out of this service.

UPDATE: And high earth orbit shows you how to go the other way.ical, Google calendar, CL2, howto, tips, sharing, calendars
Similar Posts:

Project24: Dynamic iCal calendars

Tim Gaden — Sun, 09 Apr 2006 13:59:06 +0000

The project24 web site offers iCal users a number of dynamically-generated calendars, which they can modify to their own needs and then subscribe to.

You will find a calendar that you can customise to let you know of new books at Amazon.com that match author or keyword criteria that you set. Another calendar allows you to subscribe to a detailed weather report for the country and zip code you specify.

A script that sets your current weather as your iChat status message is also available.

Most useful perhaps is the customisable holiday calendar, which provides much more control of the dates it will track than most of the ready-made, “off the shelf” calendars:

You can also find a customisable TV schedule and a biorhythms chart.

It is a useful site to add to other places like iCalShare and iCalWorld that offer pre-made, non-customisable calendars of all sorts.ical, calendars, customisable, weather, holidays, biorhythms (!), amazonSimilar Posts:

iSynCal 5:5: Full Sunbird Support

Tim Gaden — Thu, 16 Mar 2006 21:19:51 +0000

iSynCal is an app that syncs iCal events, to dos and alarms between two or more Macs without the need for a .Mac account.

It uses the Apple File Sharing feature built into OS X to get its work done and also supports WebDav over SSL, so that iSynCal can automount network volumes.

iSynCal features numerous options, including the ability to automate the synchronisations, as a screenshot of the app’s main window shows:

Click image for a full-sized view

Because iSynCal reads and synchronizes calendar files based on the open iCalendar standard, the new version (5.5) offers full syncing integration between iCal calendars and those generated by Mozilla Sunbird or the Calendar extension for Firefox and Thunderbird.

iSynCal is shareware (USD 25) and a demo is available from the developer’s web site .ical, sunbird, thunderbird, syncing, synchronization, webdev, SSL, calendars, .Mac, icalendarSimilar Posts:

iCalViewer: Streaming iCal events

Tim Gaden — Mon, 13 Feb 2006 13:28:03 +0000

iCalViewer is an app that brings your calendar out of iCal and puts it on the Desktop, where it scrolls from right to left as the days pass.

A new version (2.0.6) fixes a memory leak and offers the option to place events at the top of the window.

iCalViewer is shareware (USD 11) although a limited free version is available. You can get it from the developer’s web site .ical events, desktop, scrolling, calendars, streaming, productivitySimilar Posts: