But it does have one feature I like, the “My Day” widget that presents the day’s appointments and tasks in nice little interface. As I’ve said before, reluctantly, it’s a good idea.

Today is an app that does the same thing. It brings the day’s events and jobs together in a handy little interface that is also functional.

It copes well with CalDAV as well as “normal” iCal calendars, soups them up out of iCal and displays them nicely.

Moving the mouse over the items pops up a tool tip containing its notes.

Along the bottom of the interface, buttons allow you to add appointments and tasks directly from the app itself, perform other actions or print out the day’s activities in a handy hard copy.

The app’s preferences are fully-featured, and offer options for menubar display of the app, a global keyboard shortcut and whether or not to display it on top of other windows.

You can also stipulate which calendars to display.

A further pane provides the opportunity to set global alert styles for your appointments. So, for example, you could choose to get a fifteen minute email reminder on all your appointments, rather than hacking through iCal’s interface each time to set it individually. This looks like the most attractive time-saving option of the app to me.

An update (1.8) has just been released that promises improved performance and seamless compatibility with Snow Leopard (as it currently stands).

Today is shareware (USD 15) and is available from the developer’s web site .

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Instead of remembering obscure tags or negotiating a series of check-boxes, you just type your upcoming appointment in normal words. The widget parses your text and creates the appointment for you.

There is a Quicksilver plugin that does something similar, but with the continuing uncertainty over Quicksilver’s future development, some people way be looking for another way to do the same thing.

It is simple to use. All you need to do is type:

(It even copes with the fact that I can’t type “tmorrow” properly!).

Options on the back of the widget allow you set a number of defaults — the calendar in which the appointment should be created and a number of default ways to handle reminders:

It seems quite smart. The developer provides a list that shows the variety of “plain language” it can understand:

It can’t do repeating events or strip out the location of the event and put in iCal’s location field. But the developer is cranking out the updates and improvements, so who knows how much smarter it may become?

QuickCal requires Leopard to work its magic. It’s donation-ware and is available from the developer’s web site .

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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.

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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.

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To celebrate, I offer you a list of great add-ons or utilities that extend iCal’s ability to organise your life, with links to past Hawk Wings reviews:

Widgets

If you like widgets, DoBeDo is a great way to stay on top of your to-dos.

Highly customizable, it displays to-dos, allows you to add them, mark them completed and print them out. It comes with enough skins to please everyone:

Freeware. Get it from the developer’s web site .

Menubar utilities

High Priority gets my vote over MenuCalendarClock, not only because it is a third of the price, but also because it offers more flexible ways of managing your to-dos from the menubar. (Alhough, in fairness, if you shell out the USD 18.95 for MenuCalendarClock, you get a utility that displays events as well).

It allows you to sort your to-dos by Calendar, Due Date, Priority, Status or Title and to toggle the display of priority icons. You can use it as freeware but need to register to create to-dos. Shareware (USD 6). Get it from the developer’s web site .

Integration with Mail.app

I confess. My heart belongs to MailTags .

If it didn’t, or if MailTags’s other features aren’t important to you, nothing better integrates Mail.app and your email with iCal than Event Maker. It quickly creates normal or all-day events and to-dos from a selected message. It’s donation-ware and available from MacUpdate .

Alarms

iCal’s rich suite of alarm options is great, but it’s a pain to create them manually for each event. iCalFix 0.3 offers customizable automatic alarms for iCal, making it easy to get reminded, even if you forget to set an alarm manually. It’s donation-ware and available from Robert’s web site . (See also the shareware solution, iCal-alarmist).

Backup

Many people understand the importance of backing up their email, but don’t extend the same precautions to their iCal data.

Following an unfortunate incident with his mobile phone, Nick at Socklabs has written an AppleScript that will create backups of your iCal and Address Book data into a new folder. It also tars and gzips them and then pushes the backup to a remote host.

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The Gmail widget polls your account and displays the sender, title and (optionally) a short snippet of the message:

Further options allow you to display only messages matching a particular label.

[Via TUAW ]

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