Hawk Wings » events

EventSync: Sync iCal and facebook events

Tim Gaden — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 11:37:05 +0000

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.appSimilar Posts:

MailTags 2.2 Public Beta 4: Polished flexibility

Tim Gaden — Wed, 23 Jan 2008 12:41:59 +0000

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, eventsSimilar Posts:

An automated email of the week’s upcoming events

Tim Gaden — Mon, 21 Jan 2008 12:50:39 +0000

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, productivitySimilar 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:

Do-It: Creating iCal Events Quickly

Tim Gaden — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 12:17:26 +0000

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 RIPSimilar Posts:

MailTags for Leopard: New Public Beta

Tim Gaden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 12:05:51 +0000

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, eventsSimilar Posts:

iCal Events Widget gets Leopardised, tooltips

Tim Gaden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 11:10:24 +0000

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, productivitySimilar Posts:

Five favourite time-saving Leopard Tips

Tim Gaden — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 10:46:07 +0000

I’ve been using Leopard for long enough now to collect five tips that save me time and effort. Let me pass them on to you.

Find emails faster in Leopard Mail

Before Leopard it was possible to find emails in the list view of a mailbox faster by using the Mail Type Select plugin. With this installed, Mail.app jumped to the first message that matched your keystrokes, just as Finder does. So typing “Ros” quickly found the first email in the mailbox from Rosemary.

Now this feature is built into Leopard Mail by default. Try it out. It makes a difference.

Do your sums faster

Now that I am a Dean and need to set and manage budgets, I need to do sums more than ever before. A nice new feature in the Spotlight window, does your sums for you.

Just type in an equation, say, “12 * 34″ and Spotlight goes to Calculator and does the sum for you, giving you the answer in the Spotlight results. Nifty.

Edit iCal to-dos and events faster

In Tiger you could edit events and to-dos from the information pane. Now, iCal’s sidebar has gone to God. To edit an iCal item, you need to double-click it, wait for the details pane and then click again on the edit button on the bottom.

These extra clicks add up over time. Especially if, like me, you live in a fluid world in which tasks and meetings are always changing.

Luckily, there is a short cut to get straight to editing an event or a to-do.

Click once on the iCal item to highlight it. Then press âŒ˜-e (Command + â€˜eâ€™) and you launch into an edit dialog straight away.

Create better iCal events in Mail faster

Hovering the mouse over a name or details of an event in Leopard Mail activates Leopard’s Data Detector and produces a drop box with the option to add it to Address Book or iCal.

That’s pretty smart, but there is something even smarter lurking here.

If you block all a contactâ€™s information before you hover over the name, for example, or details of an event for iCal, the data detector pastes all the information into the new contactâ€™s or event’s notes field.

Get more out of iCal’s Dashboard Widget

The iCal Widget in Leopard has a secret up its sleeve. If you click on it once, it displays the monthly calendar we all knew and loved in Tiger.

Click on it once more, and it pulls your events for the day out into a third pane:

I get this information more easily from MenuCalendarClock, but if I didn’t have it, I’d value it here. UPDATE: Thirty seconds after posting this I found a smarter Dashboard solution.

[Via macOSXHints , TUAW , trial and error and poking around]mail.app, apple mail, ical, leopard, productivity, tips, dashboard, events, to-dos, calculator, spotlight, apple, widgetSimilar Posts:

MenuCalendarClock: Slick new to-do management features for Leopard

Tim Gaden — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 12:54:22 +0000

MenuCalendarClock is a menubar app for iCal that gives you quick access to your iCal events and to-dos. Another menubar app, High Priority, had the jump on it in Tiger, as High Priority offered the ability to create new to-dos and mark tasks as completed.

Now, the new Leopard-friendly MenuCalendarClock 3.0 offers the same interaction with to-dos. There are no plans to rewrite High Priority for Leopard, so MenuCalendarClock is worth another look.

It adds a menubar item with the date and/or the time, replacing the default System date/time display. Clicking on it opens a drop-down box with the current month, and a list of events and tasks for the day which can be toggled on and off.

Hovering over the calendar displays a tooltip containing that day’s events.

The Action wheel opens a menu with options to reveal a search field, copy today’s date into the clipboard, display the app’s preferences and more.

MenuCalendarClock is also very well provided with keyboard shortcut. By default Control-Option-Command-C pops down the display, although the combination can be set by the user in the preferences.

A further option in the preferences enables a tooltip display of the days events and to-dos when the mouse is hovered over the menubar item.

The Preference Pane controls options for general display, customising the font and colour of the time display and the choice of a number of icons.

Further options allow you to set which iCal calendars it should display and options for dealing with the birthdays of your Address Book contacts.

New in the latest version is the ability to create tasks and to edit and mark them as complete. Needless to say this passes through seamlessly into iCal and Leopard Mail’s new to-do lists.

A keyboard shortcut pops up a “heads up display” for creating a new task. I find it easier to use that the list of to-dos in Mail (subject for another post, but why are Mail’s to-do features so underdone?!).

Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like one can tab through the fields in the display, which is a pain. Also I find that I can associate a to-do with any of my iCal calendars in MenuCalendarClock, something I can’t do in Mail.app. The to-do icons are colour-coded to the particular iCal calendar. The option to colour the text of the to-do as well would be nice.

Highlighting a task, pressing Command-I to bring up the Inspector allows existing to-dos to be edited, Shift-Command-C marks it as complete. It’s fast and it’s easy to master.

MenuCalendarClock costs USD 19.95 to register. You will need to buy a licence to access the to-do management features, although some basic features can be used when it is unregistered. Also, it does the job in English, German, Finnish, French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Norwegian, Japanese and Simplified Chinese.

Get it from the developer’s web site .leopard, ical, menubar, task management, productivity, mail.app, calendar, to-dos, eventsSimilar Posts:

MailTags 2.0 Public Beta 10: Even smarter IMAP tag handling

Tim Gaden — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 11:52:37 +0000

Scott Morrison has released a new public beta of his IMAP-savvy MailTags 2.0 plugin.

Public Beta 10 introduces the ability to turn off the automatic saving of tags to IMAP servers and to manage it manually. It also fixes numerous bugs, especially issues related to smart mailboxes and “to do”-related criteria.

Since tagging IMAP messages can create extra bandwidth usage, there is now an option in MailTags’ Preferences to switch off the autmoatic saving of tags to the IMAP server. This preference is on by default. Turning it off means that tags are only saved to the local cache files. You save bandwidth, but the tags are naturally not available to other computers.

For added fine-tuning, you can choose not to save tags on messages over a certain size:

When a message has tags that are only saved to the local cache, an extra button “Save To IMAP” appears at the bottom of the tags panel.

Clicking this button will immediately save the locally cached data to the IMAP server. A similar option appears in the MailTags menu and in Mail’s Contextual menu. Or you can just highlight the message and press âŒƒâŒ˜S.

Given Scott’s trademark attention to detail and completeness, a new criterion has been added for smart mailbox configuration: “IMAP Tags are/are not saved to server”.
ï¿¼
A new icon in the MailTags column quickly indicates which messages have tags saved to the IMAP server or not. The messages with the orange tag icon have tags saved locally only:

Lastly, as extra insurance, tags not saved to the IMAP server are retained during mailbox rebuilds.

The latest public beta also contains a bucketful of bugfixes. The interface has been firmed up, HUD windows are better positioned, and customised MailTags columns behave better in the Mail Viewer.

Smart Mailboxes based on To Do items, especially on completed items, are smarter and will now work as expected, although you may need to reindex your tags using the new “Reindex Tags” option in the Preferences).

To dos now display using the user’s internationalization (or internationalisation) settings. Huzzah!

MailTags and iCal now mutually update deleted to dos and events more consistently.

Rules management has also been further improved. Two potential crashes when applying or editing rules have bene corrected, and rules are more efficiently applied.

Users with Dovecot IMAP servers will be glad to hear that MailTags no longer overwrites its X-Keywords headers when rebuilding mailboxes.

MailTags’ SpotLight importer has been updated to take account of new to do counts, completion status and IMAP save status.

This long list only picks the best bits out of a much longer changelog on the MailTags web site.

You can read more about MailTags 2.0 and download the new public beta from Scott’s web site , where you will also find a forum for any questions. mail.app, apple mail, productivity, mailtags, public beta, ical, applescript, eventsSimilar Posts: