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

A plugin for iPhoto exists that extends the range of email clients you can use to email photos from iPhoto, but nothing so far plugs that gap for webmail services.

Juan Leon stepped up to the challenge. He has produced an iPhoto plugin that uses Gmail to send photos.

After you install the package, you will find a new pane in iPhoto’s Export menu (File > Export in iPhoto 6, Share > Export in iPhoto 5):

The only possible pitfall here are the options for sizing the images. If the image you want to send is less than 800 pixels in width or height, the plugin enlarges it to that size. In that case, just select “Send original”.

Juan says that the plugin “is still a very early piece of software, probably has many bugs, and is rough around the edges”. I emailed a dozen photos of varying size and format tonight and it seems to work fine.

The resulting emails look good:

He welcomes constructive criticism at the email address you can find on his web page where you will also find the plugin, which is donationware.gmail, iphoto, email, photos, exporting, sharing, plugin, google

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, SIMBL

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 book

Publishing iCal calendars is most easily done via .Mac or on server using WebDAV.

What if you don’t have a .Mac account or access to WebDAV at your service provider or web host?

You can do it manually, using FTP, but it’s a pain. You have to hunt through iCal’s arcane naming system to find the calendar you want and them mess around with it a bit before uploading it.

Derek Jones has written a walk-through for publishing calendars which takes the pain out of the process by using Automator.

He goes through each step in creating an Automator action for this and includes some useful tips along the way. The post also includes links to two extra Automator actions that are handy in themselves.

This tip also appeared on macOSXHints.ical, sharing, publishing, calendar, automator, transmit, tips, webdav

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

Plugins and addons

I’ve added Address-O-Matic (sharing Address Books via Bonjour) to the Address Book section of the Hawk Wings Plug-in and Add-on List.

Event Maker (To dos and events from a Mail.app message) was added to the iCal section.

Backend

I noticed today that something had broken the CSS for Internet Explorer. It should be fixed now, but apologies. I don’t think about Internet Explorer users (6% of Hawk Wings visitors) as much as I should.Address book, ical, mail.app, apple mail, to dos, events, sharing, bonjour, Internet explorer, CSS