Why does the Icon display July 17th? The answer is that iCal launched on July 17th 2002 at Mac World Expo, New York.

				What is iCal. In it base form iCal is an electronic calendar, with to-do, alarms and anniversary reminders. It can display multiple calendars in one view, each calendar has a user defined colour so you can tell them apart. You can also share your calendar with others and subscribe to other calendars.

				Version as of March 2006 is 2.0.3

				http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/ical/

				Resources. http://www.icalworld.com, sadly not updated since 2003.

				Display. Main is either day, week or month. To the left is list of your calendars to be displayed. Other view options you have are: Info Mini-months Notifications - this is where you will see invites from others to an event. If you don't see any invitations, choose iCal > Preferences and click the Advanced button. Make sure the "Automatically retrieve invitations from Mail" checkbox is selected. When this checkbox is selected, any invitations you receive are automatically sent from Mail to your iCal Notifications box. To-do's. You can also detach the info draw and drag it around the screen!

				Automater you can:     Delete iCal Events Event Summary Filter iCal Items Find iCal Items Get Specified iCal Items New Calendar New iCal Events

				Alarms you can:.... Works if iCal is on or not! Create message with or without sound Send yourself an email (it gets your email address from your 'me' card in the the address book. Shame you can't send someone else a message easily.) Open a file - be it an application or a a file. Run a script.

				Scripts. Get Apple iCal scripts from http://www.apple.com/applescript/ical/02.html The Scripts are:     •    Schedule a Call - this plugin script will create a new iCal ToDo item for the current person. Click on the phone label to access.       •    Create Birthday Event - this plugin script will create a new iCal Event for the current person on their birthday. Click on the Birthday label to access.       •    Create Event - this plugin script will create a new iCal Event for the current person. Click on the phone label to access

				Mail2iCal and Mail2iCalToDo, the're free! are highly useful AppleScript applications that let you turn any email from Mac OS X Mail into a calendar or to-do list item in iCal swiftly and with all the essential data (including URLs and attendants) entered. Mail2iCal could be a bit more comfortable, though, and possibly offer per-message options. Pros     •    Mail2iCal turns emails into iCal calendar or to-do list items     •    The entire message is entered as a note and the subject becomes the iCal item title     •    Mail2iCal even detects links and moves them to the URL field, enters attendants Cons     •    Mail2iCal lacks an installer as well as installation instructions     •    You cannot select the desired calendar per item with Mail2iCal Description     •    Mail2iCal takes a message from Mac OS X Mail and turns it into an event in iCal.     •    Mail2iCalToDo creates to-do list items in iCal in the same way.     •    The message subject becomes the item title and the content is entered in full as a note.     •    Mail2iCal copies links to the URL field and enters recipients as attendants.     •    The message's sent date is when the Mail2iCal-generated event takes place by default.     •    The calendar to be used by Mail2iCal can be set by running it with no message selected.     •    Mail2iCal and Mail2iCalToDo support Mac OS X 10.4. Guide Review - Mail2iCal 1.4 and Mail2iCalToDo 1.4 Mac OS X Mail Add-Ons Have you ever wished you could just drag an email from Mac OS X Mail to iCal, where it would transform into an appointment or to do list item with all the necessary details intelligently filled in? With Mail2iCal (or Mail2iCalToDo), you cannot do that. But you can do something similar and just about as useful. A script accessible via the AppleScript menu, Mail2iCal creates a new iCal calendar item from the currently selected message in Mail (processing multiple emails in one go is possible): the subject becomes the item title, the entire body a note, and the recipient automatically becomes an attendant. Links in the message are even thoughtfully entered in the event's "URL" field. Mail2iCalToDo turns messages into to-do items in like manner. While Mail2iCal is not exactly difficult to install (open "AppleScript Utility", enable the "Script Menu", launch Mail, open the Mail scripts folder from said menu and move Mail2iCal and Mail2iCalToDo to that folder), the lack of instructions can make it a tad more cumbersome than needed. Per-message options — such as the calendar used, for example — would be nice.

				Create a smart folder on your desktop to search for key-words, such as a customer. Create a new Smart Folder, in the Search for box write the subject of the find. In the pull down box select "kind', in the next pull down box select "others", and in the next box type "ical event". Double click a entry to go to that entry.

				Office - Groupware.

				Home - without .Mac

				.Mac makes it very easy to share your calendars with other .Mac users & view them online.

				Subscribing to other Calendars.

				Auto-event - Drag address book cards to automatically create and event for that person or group

				Calendar automatically looks up birthdays from you Address Book. Select Addess Panel from Windows menu for a mini-address book, drag contact from here to iCal. iCal creates an icon of a little man to show a contact is assigned to this event. The contact is displayed in the Attendees panel. Click the Attendees name and you can send an them an email, show them in address book, edit the contact or remove them.

				Check out the printing options in iCal.

				More printing options with 'Office-Style' printing from http://www.pocketmac.net/products/pmicalprinter/index.html

				SOHO Calendars is the easiest way to share calendars on Mac OS X. Shared calendars, events, and to-dos show up automatically in Apple's iCal where they can viewed and edited. A change made to a shared calendar on one user's machine automatically shows up in everyone else's iCal. SOHO Calendars is perfect for managing meetings, group projects and shared to-do lists.

					O'Reilly's Smart Home Hacks

				David Allen - Getting Things Done £7.25 from Amazon. With first-chapter allusions to martial arts, "flow", "mind like water", and other concepts borrowed from the East (and usually mangled), you'd almost think this self-helper from David Allen should have been called Zen and the Art of Schedule Maintenance. Not quite. Yes, Getting Things Done offers a complete system for downloading all those free-floating gotta-dos clogging your brain into a sophisticated framework of files and action lists--all purportedly to free your mind to focus on whatever you're working on. However, it still operates from the decidedly Western notion that if we could just get really, really organised, we could turn ourselves into 24/7 productivity machines.

				43 Folders, Merlin