iCal

A Week with Leopard's New iCal and Mail.app

wood.tang — Tue, 13 Nov 2007 16:33:11 -0500

While most sensible Mac users were looking forward to cool new features in Leopard like Cover Flow, Quick Look, and Time Machine, I was sitting on the edge of my seat, itching to try out iCal and Mail.app’s new to-do list integration. I agree with Merlin’s approach to using a bunch of single-purpose applications that are very good at what they do instead of a bloated piece of do-everything-ware like Outlook—“a series of super-sharp paring knives over one monstrous Swiss Army Knife”—as he put it, but I looked forward to a little bit of teamwork between two of the applications I use the most. And boy, am I disappointed.

I’ve professed my love for iCal here repeatedly, but the biggest reason I like it is that I can manage my entire pile of stuff within its colorful, round-cornered confines. I keep my projects and responsibility lists there, my someday/maybe items, all of my next actions. I litter the calendar with reminders and subscribe to my favorite teams’ schedules.

I never felt the need for super-tight integration with my email before; if something important came via email, I usually banged out a corresponding to-do item, and filed the message away where I could find it later. I start to get twitchy when I have to look in too many different places for my stuff, which is why I’ve always turned away from high-powered task managers like OmniFocus. To me, what I have to do consists of my calendar and my to-do list, and I want that all in one place.

That being said, I was intrigued by Leopoard Mail.app’s new ability to create to-do items directly out of an email, partly because I have a fetish for that stuff, and sadly, because it looked cool. So the first thing I did after installing Leopard was try it out. That’s where the problems began.

The To-Do Two-Step

The initial import of my context calendars and to-do items from iCal seemed to be static. If I made changes to them either in Mail or iCal, nothing synced between the two. If I created a new item it worked, so I chalked it up to an upgrade issue, but I noticed later that to-do items I created solely on local iCal calendars wouldn’t disappear from Mail’s list if I deleted them from iCal.

Next, I tried creating a to-do item from one of my emails, which, forgive me for being slow, was confusing at first. I thought I could just select a message, click the to-do button, and assign a description. This is at least the way I’ve thought about email tasks in the past, something like “Call Joe to talk about Mary’s email,” which refers me to said message, not necessarily a specific sentence in it.

Instead, to create a to-do from Mail, you have to select a piece of text from your message, which then becomes your task description. This is all fine and dandy if it was easy to edit that text to suit your needs. But how often does someone email you a perfect explanation of what to do? Right. So once I figured this part out, I tried editing the description, but Mail would repeatedly skip back to the beginning and replace what I typed with the original text. Sometimes it took me two or three tries to get it right.

I believe this has something to do with my Mail set up. I pipe everything through a Gmail account, which I now check via IMAP. In this arrangement, Mail actually stores the to-do items as messages in your mail account. In fact, every time you sync you Gmail account, Mail writes a new version of the message. I didn’t realize this until I looked at my Gmail archive and saw seven copies of each to-do.

I did some unscientific testing by watching the activity window in Mail, and I think that when I started to create a to-do item out of a message, Mail immediately synced with Gmail. If I tried editing the description before it finished, it replaced my text with the original version, now living on the server. I realized I could prevent this from happening by waiting a few seconds to edit, but c’mon, that isn’t why I use a Mac. The same thing happened if I created a new to-do item in iCal and tried to make a quick change.

To make matters worse, Mail seems to get confused about discrepancies between the local and server versions of these to-do “messages” very easily. A dialog box asking me if I wanted to keep the local or server version popped up repeatedly, and would loop endlessly unless I chose the server version.

Calendars, Calendars Everywhere

Another problem I encountered is how Mail and iCal allocate their calendars. Like many GTD-centric iCal users, I make separate calendars for different to-do lists. But Mail doesn’t see these calendars; instead, you have to create separate ones that live within the mail account.

I tried to get around this limitation by creating mail to-do’s in a temporary calendar then moving them to my main ones, but if you move a to-do item from one calendar to another with a different name, it breaks the link to the mail message, which defeats the whole purpose of this tortuous exercise. The only workaround I see is to create duplicate sets of calendars in both iCal and your mail account. If you move to-do’s between calendars with the same name, the link is preserved, but again, I use a Mac so I don’t have to do shit like that.

These special mail calendars also can’t sync with iPods through iTunes. Maybe the forthcoming Leopard version of Missing Sync for Blackberry, Palm, and Windows Mobile PDA users will tackle this, but there’s no reason they should have all the fun. I know the iPod’s PIM features don’t exactly get people rioting on the streets, but on that mythical day when the iPhone gets a to-do list and syncs it through iTunes, one would hope that this gets fixed.

As useful as they might be when you can actually create one, to-do’s with attached mail messages also screw up my new favorite trick, the aforementioned “Ass Pocket of iCal.” If you print your to-do list, and any of the items have attached messages, iCal tosses either a messy local URL or huge block of ASCII gobbledegook in the notes field. This is a cosmetic problem that irritates a particular sore spot for me, I know, but it’s just another item in a long list of disappointments.

Do Over

I won’t go so far as calling Mail.app’s to-do functionality half-assed, but it also appears to be tacked on as an afterthought. I might have complicated matters by throwing an IMAP account into the mix, but I can’t imagine that Apple doesn’t have software testers on staff who think about this kind of stuff. But then again, maybe I’m asking them to cater to too specific a need. Mail does offer some nifty hooks into iCal, like recognizing dates and times and letting you create a new event, but the rest of its integration is just confusing and messy.

By itself, Mail’s to-do’s work fine, and if you feel the need to liberate lots of actions from messages, maybe you should consider doing most of your work there. But if you’re a heavy iCal user like me, or find yourself thinking about getting some hot Mail-on-iCal action going, you need to wait for Apple to try again.

”A Week with Leopard's New iCal and Mail.app” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 13, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

An Ass Pocket of iCal

wood.tang — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 18:56:51 -0400

A few posts back, I professed my love for paper. That affection runs deep already, but I stumbled onto a trick this week that makes me lust after the power of a sheet of 8.5” x 11” even more.

As I’m wont to do, I returned to the Lucky Charms, marshmallowy goodness of iCal recently to organize my stuff. I know it isn’t perfect, but it’s my comfort zone, and after flogging myself publicly over my tendency to switch systems, I decided to stick with the ol’ July 17 icon for better or for worse.

In my paper post, I mentioned that I like to jot down a few tasks at the beginning of each day, to focus my energy. It’s not GTD orthodoxy, but with a job like mine, I have to make a plan of attack or else it will be lost in a pile of board books and Legos. Normally this does the trick, but on days when I have lots of reminders, or appointments with accompanying notes, it can be tedious copying this all down. So one day this week, when I was in a hurry out the door, I decided to print out an agenda from iCal.

Maybe I’m a dope for never experimenting with this, but have you seen what you can do with iCal’s print dialog? Merlin has written about this before, but the ability to pick and choose which calendars to print, restricting the view to a day, a week, a month, or my favorite, a simple list, just made me reaffirm my vows with iCal. Here’s what I do (in Tiger, mind you, so Leopard early-adopters may have to adjust accordingly … I’m upgrading this weekend, promise):

I keep my Next Actions/To-Do’s in separate calendars, and set tickler reminders as all-day events in the calendar. Each morning, I set a due date of that day for the items I’d theoretically like to tackle by EOB, and sort my calendars by due date so they float to the top of the list.
Next, I pop open the print dialog (“File > Print” or “Cmd-P”). I select “List” from the “View:” dropdown, then make sure all the right calendars/contexts are selected. I also check every other option except “Black and White”, because I’m accustomed to the various colors I assigned to my calendars as visual reminders (if this doesn’t matter to you, check that box and save yourself some ink).
Finally, I fold it up in quarters and put it in my back pocket. Throughout the day I can cross things off and use the white space as an inbox. Then, at the end of the day, I reconcile everything with the mothership. On days when I’m going to the gym, I even print my workout routine checklist on the backside to really feel the burn.

Maybe this isn’t rocket science, and iPhone and mobile sync bandits may scoff at the manual approach. Personally, I hate printers too, but this little trick has given my sad little Canon i960 new life.

”An Ass Pocket of iCal” was written by Matt Wood for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 01, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

"Make iCal": Granular event creation via Quicksilver

Merlin Mann — Thu, 21 Dec 2006 09:46:59 -0500

Hawk Wings » Blog Archive » A powerful new iCal action for Quicksilver

Hawk Wings has a great feature on a new Quicksilver plugin for detailed task and event creation. The already-swell stock iCal plugin lets you select a new event’s date and calendar, but this tricked-out new edition by Benjamin Harley lets you add more granular details on length of event, location, notes, alarm, and more.

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).

Tim is hosting this file himself, as well as providing a very useful key to the syntax that you can print out while you’re learning the ropes.

If you’re not already a big Quicksilver fan, this probably won’t mint you as a new one, but if you’re a text-y geek who’s more comfortable with fast typing than changing modes, this is quite a gem.

”"Make iCal": Granular event creation via Quicksilver” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on December 21, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43F Recap: Best of iCal Tips

Merlin Mann — Wed, 30 Aug 2006 08:47:26 -0400

Wow. It’s been over nine months since I quit Entourage in favor of the kGTD/iCal productivity tag-team. In that time, I could have had an infant, finished a school year, or been responsible for a couple failed sitcoms. (I mean: if I had a uterus, was still in college, and were, say, McLean Stevenson)

Yes, friends, I do still spend a lot of my day shaking my hammy fist in impotent rage at iCal’s numerous shortcomings, but I’ve reached a kind of détente with Apple’s stock calendaring app, and along the way I’ve discovered some modest ways to squeeze more drops of Cupertino-y goodness from its moist Jolly Rancher-like pages. Here’s a few of my favorites.

Getting more out of iCal - “The truth is, iCal works great with kGTD (mostly of course), and once you make your peace with the perplexing stasis of its feature set, there are some not-bad hooks and affordances hiding in its pastel, roundy corners. Here’s a few I like.”
HOWTO: Flag “penciled-in” events in iCal - “When I create the event, I just put a Spanish-language question mark “¿” (hit: OPTION-SHIFT-?) in front of the event’s title. Like so…”
Schedule (and choose) a dash in iCal “If you start the name of the task with the number of minutes in the dash, you have a very easy to way to see items that can be knocked down quickly (hint: sort “To Dos by Title”).”
Dr. Contextlove or: “How I stopped worrying and learned to love iCal” - “But why bother with organizing these into meta-groups? Ah, because it makes it so easy to reveal or hide all the tasks that I can work on at a given time, just by ticking the group’s little click box.”
Kinkless GTD .83: Enhances Quicksilver and iCal integration, much more “I really like to plan in kGTD and then do out of iCal since it reduces the amount of fiddling and meta work temptation. That doesn’t mean, however, that I wouldn’t benefit from a little extra backward integration.”

”43F Recap: Best of iCal Tips” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 30, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

HOWTO: Flag "penciled-in" events in iCal

Merlin Mann — Thu, 06 Jul 2006 10:34:22 -0400

As I’ve mentioned before, I like using iCal’s invitations to share appointments with people — especially since this lets them easily respond to let me know whether they 1) will attend, 2) won’t attend, or 3) are just “tentative.” Unfortunately, there’s no analogous tentative flag for the (seemingly endless) number of appointments and events I want to just pencil-in — you know, those times when you want to make sure to block out time for a call or lunch, but are waiting on confirmation from folks who don’t use iCal (or for whom it makes no sense to pester with an invitation). My workaround — yes, like many of these things — is really simple.

When I create the event, I just put a Spanish-language question mark “¿” (hit: OPTION-SHIFT-?) in front of the event’s title. Like so:

So, why’s this work?

most importantly, I never accidentally book two Canadian actress pancake breakfasts in the same time slot
if/when the event is finalized, all I have to do is remove the “¿” flag/character
if it never gets finalized, but the notification still pops up, I can quickly see that it’s not a “real” appointment, and I can just delete it
because this hacky “flag” is the first character of the event, it won’t be cut off when viewing events in the crowded week or month views

Like I say, simple little trick, but it’s saved my non-Canadian bacon on a number of occasions.

”HOWTO: Flag "penciled-in" events in iCal” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on July 06, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Getting more out of iCal

Merlin Mann — Thu, 29 Jun 2006 11:01:07 -0400

Okay, I admit it. I’ve grumbled about iCal on and off since it came out. It’s one of those things in life that makes you nuts with how it almost works. The alarm choices are amazing but there’s no way to have them added automatically. The shared calendars are great, but only one person can make changes. The snoozing sucks, notifications magically disappear, and some days, the “moist Jolly Rancher” design motif makes me want to barf pink. Hrmph. But (and it’s a big but)…

The truth is, iCal works great with kGTD (mostly of course), and once you make your peace with the perplexing stasis of its feature set, there are some not-bad hooks and affordances hiding in its pastel, roundy corners. Here’s a few I like.

Calendar Groups

Yes, I’ve mentioned these repeatedly, but they’re just so great. The killer trick here is the ability to nest contexts/calendars in a way that supports either “Areas of Responsibility” (if you use calendars as projects) or — my preference — grouping related contexts into “Super Contexts.”

So, for example, I’ve put “email,” “web,” “design,” “print,” “google,” and “buy online” tasks into a group called “Computer.” When I’m planning for a time when I won’t be at the computer, I deselect one box, and a couple dozen tasks I can’t possibly do anything about just disappear. Print that list, and off I go.

Remember: whether or not you’re doing GTD, it’s valuable to always know what you don’t need to be thinking about at a given time. Think about it.

Work the notes field

I use the crap out of iCal’s various extra fields — esp. for appointments.

Phone calls - paste the number you need to call in the notes field, so you have it right where you need it when you need it
Meeting and call agendas - When you set an appointment, paste in the contents of the email where the meeting’s raison d’être was laid out. Or just type in 3-5 quick bullets on what you’ll need to cover. You’ll thank yourself when the notification pops up three months from now and you’re thinking “Status meeting about what?!?!”
“Homework” assignments - When I send coaching clients an iCal invite for a call or appointment, I use the notes field to remind them what they’ll need to prepare, read, or bring along before we meet. Easier and much more convenient than a separate email.
Attendees - Definitely use the “Attendees” field even if you don’t send an invitation. As we’ll see below, the print-out of your calendar can be set to include the phone numbers of everyone involved. Super useful when you’re stuck on the train and want to let ‘em know you’ll be ten minutes late.
Address & Directions - I always drop in the address of the offsite location and usually include a link to the Google map for the location (invited attendees love this). When you get the morning alarm for an afternoon meeting, print out the map and drop it in your bag (or, be really cool: print it out the day you schedule the meeting, and put it in your tickler file)
From/To times - Yes this is a weird suggestion, and I’ll own that. My friend Dennis taught me to make appointments at “odd times.” Think about it: if you tell someone “I’ll pick you up at 7:08” they’re much more likely to see it as a time certain rather than the squishy quarter-hour SWAGs by which most of us schedule our world.

Print it out

Although it could benefit from a few more printing options, iCal’s current print capabilities are actually pretty smart and can be used to great ends.

Calendars on or off - It’s really handy to be able to say which calendars/contexts you want to see on your print-out. Having a day where you can’t afford to fiddle around? Print a to-do list with a focused subset of “calls,” “email,” and “to-schedule” and then turn off all your “productivity” crap. Have a “vertical day” where you only work on stuff for one project. Let self-imposed constraints give you a little extra focus.
Travel light - Before you head out for the day, print an updated copy of your calendar for the next 3 months and stick it in your bag. It’s a fast way to glance your availability on the road (without needing to truck a laptop around). Scribble changes on the calendar over lunch, and when you get home, enter the new events into iCal.
Daily agenda - I love printing out a List view for the day before I hit the road. Appointments (with, as above, phone numbers), plus a list of my current to-dos all in one place.

Random tips

Running dashes - If you could benefit from a few procrastination dashes, make sure to expose that right in the task. If you want to spend five fast minutes drafting a letter, create an item called “05dash - Draft letter to Anil.” To show only tasks like this that are quickly “dash-able” do a search on “dash.” Bingo.
Backup - It only takes a minute to back-up iCal “File > Back up Database” and it might save your ass some day. Do a backup every week and every time you think of it.
Rerrange to-dos manually - If sorting your to-dos by “Calendar,” “Date,” “Title,” or “Priority” doesn’t do it for you, try dragging them around “Manually.” It’s buggy and will probably lose its order if you click around (or sync with kGTD) but this manual shuffling is a fast way to reconfigure your per-day focus on the fly.

Got a great iCal tip? What cool stuff are you doing with iCal?

”Getting more out of iCal” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on June 29, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Applescript to "sync" iCal to your Hipster PDA

Merlin Mann — Thu, 27 Oct 2005 07:41:41 -0400

mccamon.org

Mike McCamon offers a clever way to get just his task list from iCal printed onto index cards for his Hipster PDA. Applescript to the rescue:

Then I went to print. Crap. I can’t print just the Task list - I have to take the Calendar too. Enter AppleScript. With a little copy and pasting from code I found around the web I came up with a script to print only the Tasks of a selected Calendar. I also modified that script to print me all my Next Actions from all my Calendars.

Haven’t tried it yet (not an iCal user, myself), but given the number of folks linking to Mike, I suspect it must work.

Also, +1 for the excellent disclaimer, Mike; I can see we share a personal liability.

[ via Sync Your HipsterPDA to Your Mac - Lifehacker ]

”Applescript to "sync" iCal to your Hipster PDA” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 27, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"