Benjamin Harley, creator of ABGMerge, the Gmail contacts-Address Book syncing app, has also scripted a powerful iCal action for Quicksilver , which is more flexible and has more options than Quicksilver’s built-in iCal plugin.

It’s complicated (power comes at a cost) but offers a speedy way to quickly enter a complete iCal item on the fly whichever app you are in. I use the current public beta of MailTags to do this when I am in Mail.app, which has the added bonus of automatically creating a URL link back to the email in question. But I’m not always in Mail (sadly).

UPDATE: You can get the latest version of the script here

Download and unzip it, then place it in your ~/Library/Application Support/Quicksilver/Actions folder.

You will need to restart Quicksilver and may need to add the Actions folders to your Quicksilver Catalog (Click the “plus” button and use the “File and Folder Scanner”) so that Quicksilver can find it.

UPDATE: You will also need to edit the script slightly. Open it up in Script editor or the app of your choice and change the property for the default calendar from “Home” to whatever calendar you would like the to-dos and events to be created in.

To use it, type “make ical” into Quicksilver’s first window, select “Process Text…” in the Action window and then type the text to create the to-do or event in the third pane.

For example:

This creates a to-do in my Trinity Calendar, specifies a date, adds an alarm and some notes so that I will know where to send the comments on this student’s work, and opens iCal to show me that it was created correctly:

Events are just as quick and just as clever:

This creates an event for a meeting tomorrow.

I don’t need to go back to iCal to edit the event; everything I want to add I can add via the Quicksilver action.

The text for this one adds a note about how the meeting might unfold, a location, a date, a starting time, a two hour duration, specifies which calendar to add it to and adds an alarm so that my boss won’t sack me for forgetting to meet with him.

The only downside is that you need to remember the letter for each option.

Benjamin has provided some initial documentation.

The commands can be entered in any order and they are:

t-- [title of to-do]

e-- [title of event] (use t-- or e-- to determine whether the script will create a to-do or an event. The default is a to-do. So if you just type some text (without t--) it will come out as a to-do)

d-- [start date (or due date for to-dos) in m/d/y format (or whatever your system is set to). The default is today for events (in 3 days for to-dos), +n to set that many days from today], [hour in hh:mm format, 24hr clock], [end date in m/d/y format, or +n for number of days if it is an all day event, default is same as start date], [end hour in hh:mm format, +n is number of hours from start date, default is +1], [a for an all-day event].

a-- [set an alarm (default for events is -1 hour, for to-dos 10 am on due date)

n-- [to add to notes section]

l-- [location]

c-- [calendar - default is home]

p-- [priority n,l,m,h (for to-dos only)]

u-- [URL reference]

cb-- [copy contents of clipboard to notes section - will always come after the text in the n-- section]

s-- or show-- [show the event or to-do in iCal after creation so you can check and see if it is right]

Examples

‘do this d-- a-- c--Work cb-- s-- p--h’ will create a to-do with title “do this”, with the clipboard copied to the notes, with a due date in 3 days, an alarm at 10 am and in the calendar named “Work” (if it exists, otherwise in the default which is “Home’), with a high priority and open iCal and show this to-do as soon as it has been created

‘e-- meet someone l--someone’s house n-- the directions a--2 d-- +2 17:00 +2′ will create an event “meet someone” two days from now starting at 5 pm and lasting for 2 hours with an alarm 2 hours before hand with a location “someone’s house” with “the directions” in the notes.

Get a copy of this list here.

[Big hat tip to Benjamin for sharing]quicksilver, ical, action, script, to-dos, events, productivity, on the fly

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. ical, birthdays, anniversaries, events, calendar, dates

Mike Abdullah has updated his excellent Event Maker utility which allows for the quick creation of to-dos or events from an email in Mail.app or from scratch.

Coupled to a Quicksilver trigger (or similar), it is available system-wide, not only in Mail, as a slick way to get meetings and reminders into iCal.

The most recent version (0.4.3) fixes bugs in the Undo and Redo menus and tweaks the display of its alarms option.

Since, I last posted about it, the app has also added AppleScript support for alarms and keyboard shortcuts for adding and removing alarms.

Extra nifty, something that I had not noticed before, it allows you to set multiple alarms for the one event, in this case an email 45 minutes before, a message alert fifteen minutes before and then to launch a script that starts the event:

I’m not going to be able to forget that one easily.

Of course, most of the time I am using the clever new features in the public beta of MailTags to do this kind of scheduling work, but Event Maker is a very handy addition to my productivity tool-kit for the rare times that I am not in Mail but still need to schedule stuff.

Event Maker is donation-ware and you can get it from MacUpdate .mail.app, apple mail, ical, productivity, to-dos, events, plugins, applescript

Scott Morrison has released an updated public beta of MailTags 2.0.

Public Beta 5 fixes a new bug in the previous beta in which tagging a message with an attachment could — in some circumstances — destroy the attachment data.

Obviously, this makes the new version a recommended upgrade for all users of the public beta.

This new version also brings some new features to the events bezel: it now has a close button and the calendar list shows calendars from iCal rather than MailTags projects.

The public beta of MailTags is free, although the finished release will be shareware. You can pre-order it for USD 25.

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, events

Scott Morrison has let loose the fourth public beta of the next version of MailTags, a plugin which provides integration with iCal and the tagging and productivity muscle which Mail.app lacks by default.

New features and greater stability are the hallmarks of the new beta, most notably iCal event creation from an email, a new Copy URL function and improved handling of IMAP connections and AppleScript.

The new event creation pane lets you do almost everything except set alarms. Clicking on the small plus sign under Events in the MailTags pane makes the events pane pop up:

Needless to say, each event thus created in iCal contains a hyperlink back to the email for ready reference and extra details.

To-do creation will eventually also use a pane like this. You can already create multiple events, multiple to-dos from a single email are coming soon.

Also very useful is the ability to create durable, move-proof hyperlinks to a Mail message which you can paste into other apps like Yojimbo, SOHO Notes or whatever. Oddly, I posted about this before it was released, so you can read more about this feature and see some examples in an earlier Hawk Wings post.

Less visible improvements include tweaks producing faster interaction with IMAP servers and fewer traffic jams due to too many open files. You won’t see this feature, but you’ll enjoy it.

Lastly, some kinks in the plugin’s AppleScript support have been ironed out, and Scott has added a sample script for creating a Yojimbo item that links back to the message, copying tags and the URL for the message.

The public beta of MailTags is free, although the finished release will be shareware. You can pre-order it for USD 25.

You can read more about MailTags 2.0 and its new features and download the 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, events

Scott Morrison has released a third public beta of MailTags 2.0, the next supercharged version of his outstanding plugin for Mail.app (Read more about this plugin which has totally revolutionised the way I use Mail in earlier reviews of MailTags 1.2 and MailTags 1.2.2).

Although it comes with very sensible warnings about the dangers of beta software, I am finding it remarkably stable. It came out of the sandbox and into my real life email long ago without any problems.

Public Beta 3 adds AppleScript support which allows scripts to access and set tags.

Its support for threaded views in Mail is greatly improved. The plugin will now display all keywords and projects within a thread, as well as priorities and due dates.

Two niggles have been corrected: IMAP messages no longer disappear from smart mailboxes after they are tagged and preferences for projects and keywords are less likely to become corrupted.

The ability to set an iCal event (as well as to-dos) almost made the cut for this beta. Expect to see it soon, making MailTags more and more the complete package for Mail and iCal integration.

You can read more about MailTags 2.0 and its new features and download the 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, events

Terry posted a comment today in an earlier Hawk Wings post about the formal syntax for creating iCal events and to-dos with the Quicksilver iCal plugin. It was news to me; it might be to you too.

Although the iCal plugin does its best to parse the date, time and content from your text string, you can help it along.

The documentation for the Quicksilver iCal plugin sets out the correct syntax. For events, it expects your text to look like:

For to-dos:

NB: Those long dashes are actually two hyphens.

Adding exclamation marks increases the priority of the to-do.

UPDATE: As Cooper points out in the comments, you need to enable Quicksilver’s advanced features option to make this work:

You will also find in the documentation some feature requests for the plugin that would be terrific, like the ability to mark to-dos done or add attendees.quicksilver, ical, events, to-dos, syntax, format, plugins, productivity