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For six years, the Internet Nexus served as my technology blog, but I've since started blogging at the SuperSite Blog instead. If you're looking for the blog, please head there. --Paul

Thursday, April 28, 2005

Tiger Feature of the Day: iCal 2.0 Improvements

Mac OS X 10.4 "Tiger" includes a new version of iCal that includes a number of useful new features. For example, you can automatically create a meeting event by dragging an Address Book contact or group of contacts onto an iCal calendar. When you do so, a new meeting appears in iCal on the date and time you selected, with those contacts listed as attendees.

(You can also drag iCal To Do items into the calendar to create events. In this case, the title of the To Do is used to name the event.)

iCal integrates with Address Book in other ways, too. For example, you can turn on an optional Birthdays calendar (from iCal Preferences) that finds any of your contacts' birthdays and lists them in your calendar. The Birthdays calendar is read-only.

Additionally, iCal now integrates with Mail. You can configure iCal to automatically grab invitations that arrive via Mail. When such an invitation arrives, you can reply using the Notifications button in the lower-left corner of the iCal window. This button toggles the Notifications pane, which displays any unanswered invitations. The Notifications pane also displays any incoming answers to event requests you've made.

Finally, iCal 2.0 also integrates with Spotlight. This means you can search for calendar events and To Do items directly from the search box in the bottom of the iCal window. Search results appear in a pop-up search results pane.

[ Posted at 10:40 PM | Permalink ]