James Frye has written a small app that syncs facebook events into iCal, so that you can integrate your facebook invitations with the rest of your calendars in one view.

Packaged up as a stand-alone app, it first authenticates into your facebook account, and then retrieves a list of your events.

Its Preferences allow you to determine whether or not it lists events that you have accepted, declined, are unsure about or have not yet replied to.

You are then presented with a dialog containing the events:

Hit the sync button, and the app creates a new local calendar in iCal called “facebook events”, displaying all your “facebook dates”.

Because it is all listed in one new calendar, it’s easy to delete them again—say, hypothetically, you have a student who has (by mistake?) created a 21st birthday party that lasts for a month. It’s easy to undo the sync again.

James is working on EventSync 2.0 which will display the flyers and images associated with the facebook events as well.

EventSync is donation-ware and can be downloaded from its own web site.facebook, ical, events, syncing, social networking, not apple mail, not mail.app

As MailTags forges it way towards an official Version 2.2, Scott Morrison has released the fourth public beta of the plugin.

In addition to a bunch of the usual improvements and bug-fixes (improving the reliability of the Spotlight Importer, tweaking some Preference options and settings, a nice resizable keyword token field which now displays all your tags), this latest release addresses a quirk with the way Gmail implements IMAP. In order to prevent problems, it now saves tags only to the local cache of Gmail accounts in Mail.app.

MailTags looks more polished, as Scott makes it into the most “native” plugin going around. It almost seems built-in to the app, rather than an added extra.

The pop-up dialogs for to-dos and events created on a Leopard Mail Note are now a fetching dark brown colour, which blends in nicely with the yellow lined-paper of the Note itself:

I missed the third public beta, being at the beach, so haven’t yet had a chance to note a change in the way MailTags is constructed.

Some elements are now split off as optional “extras” — plug-ins for the plug-in, so to speak — which promises a more efficient, more flexible, more user-customisable future.

It also provides a easy invitation for third-party developers to create specific MailTags plug-ins for their apps (OmniFocus, Yojimbo, Things, iGTD?).

Its iCal integration features are now a separate “extra” and a new feature, the Quick Message Colour Picker is another. It lets you colour-code the selected email with a single mouse click. A new Extras Preference Tab in the MailTags Pane controls their behaviour.

For example, in the Message Colour extra preferences, you can chose your preferred swatch colours and decide whether or not to delete the message colour when all MailTags info is deleted from an email.

If you don’t want an option to colour emails on the fly, you can just disable the extra in the Preferences:

Another small but useful feature in the new beta is the welcome return of the red icon to mark a tag that hasn’t been uploaded to the IMAP server yet. Mail users on dial-up connections at the beach (and probably elsewhere) will be pleased to see this back.

You can read more about MailTags for Leopard and download the newest, fourth public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions, bug reports or comments. mail.app, apple mail, imap, tagging, productivity, mailtags, public beta, ical, applescript, events

No matter how cleverly or reliably you set up a system for sharing calendars, it all depends on your partner / spouse / work colleague / children / significant other looking at the calendar from time to time. What if they don’t?

George Starcher has the same problem as I do, and he has the answer. He explains how to create an Automator action that will pull out the events for the upcoming week from individual iCal calendars and email them to your significant other and/or negligent fellow worker.

Moving carefully through his steps in Automator and setting the resulting plug-in to run in iCal takes about five minutes.

Some of this steps are, in fact, unnecessary. You don’t need to create a calendar for the plug-in in iCal first, saving it as an iCal plug-in will create an Automator calendar for you.

The end result is a nice email full of what’s coming up:

Of course, success depends on the theory that the significant other is more likely to read an email than look at a calendar. YMMV. automator, ical, collaboration, sharing, calenders, events, mail.app, apple mail, productivity

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.

Apple may have taken away iCal’s Information Pane in Leopard, but that doesn’t mean you are forced to use the new pop-up Edit pane.

There are lots of other quicker options (Quicksilver, MailTags, Event Maker if you are still using Tiger).

Leopard users can now add Do-It to the list.

This stand-alone app offers a “quick entry” interface for the creation of iCal events.

Fire it up with a few keystrokes in Quicksilver or have it ready to click in the Dock, and it quickly provides you with an interface that is tab-friendly and easy to navigate:

The disk image includes Tiger- and Leopard-specific builds.

Do-It is freeware and available in the Automator section of Apple’s Downloads web site.ical, productivity, quick entry, quicksilver, mailtags, event maker, events, the much lamented ical info pane RIP

Scott Morrison has released a second public beta of MailTags for Leopard.

The updated beta features all the improvement of the six private beta versions that he has rolled out since the last public beta.

As a result, MailTags is now faster, more stable and reliable under Leopard. In particular, issues with Preferences, tagging, formatting links to individual emails (message URLs) and rules have been resolved.

MailTags also no longer causes Mail.app to open in the background.

However, it is not all just tidying up. Scott has added two new features to the second beta.

MailTags will now check the indev website for new versions at launch. If an updated version is found, the new release notes will be displayed with a button to open the download page in your browser:

In addition, the new beta adds a MT Debug menu to Mail’s menubar to help testers choose different debugging options. Once upon a time, these options could only be accessed with arcane Terminal commands. Not any more.

What’s next? Now that the foundation of the plugin are solid under Leopard, Scott intends to re-introduce the to-do and event features of MailTags. Soon my niggles with the way Leopard Mail does this itself will be a thing of the past!

Once again, Scott’s warning is worth heeding:

Our private beta testers have worked over the last few weeks to test many functions of MailTags. Our priorities are, as always, data safety (for your mail and your tags), reliability and stability. While we are confident that MailTags meets these requirements, we advise that some issues may have escaped our notice. We strongly recommend you maintain backups of your mail data or avoid using MailTags in critical situations.

You can read more about MailTags for Leopard and download the new public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions, bug reports or comments. mail.app, apple mail, productivity, mailtags, public beta, ical, applescript, events

Hmmm… Ever published a blog post, only to discover a better solution thirty seconds later?

The iCal Events widget has been updated for Leopard and now sports a more pretty interface.

The developer says that on Leopard the widget is “dramatically less processor- and memory-intensive” that it was under Tiger.

It pulls your events out of iCal and displays them, nicely colour-coded, for today and as many days into the future as you care to set in the preferences on the reverse of the widget.

Clicking an event takes you to it in iCal. It now also features a useful tooltip. Hover your mouse over the event and it displays the contents of the notes field and the location in the widget’s status bar.

The Preference Pane on the back also allows you to select which calendars the widget will pull events from.

iCal Events is freeware and available from the developer’s web site .ical, widgets, dashboard, events, leopard, productivity