Get more brain space, part 2
We are back, taking on iCal, the calender application of Mac OS X.
In the following we show you, how to use iCal for planing your schedule and how to make birthdays of your contacts in Address Book automatically show up in iCal (and thus giving you more free space in your brain)
First, launch iCal by clicking its icon in the Dock. The icon changes every day, always displaying the current date - nice touch, huh?
Let’s go through the different areas of iCal quickly.
Calendars to the left side: You can have multiple calendars, to show you different kinds of appointments (e.g one for work, one for spare time appointments). You can check and uncheck them to display/hide the appointments of a certain calendar. There is a mini-calendar in the lower left corner and several controls to change the view at the top of the window. These are used to change the main view.
Add an event
1) Select the calendar you want the event to be in (e.g. Home, Work)
2) Double click somewhere “inside” the day of the event.
3) An event is created and you can enter the name of the event. Finish by hitting the return key
4) Click on the event, and press command-E (or via the menu: Edit - Edit Event…) to bring up the details of the event.
5) Now click on the times (and dates) to adjust them.
6) You can also set a location, make the event an all-day event or set an alarm.
Delete an event
To remove an event, click on it once an hit the Delete key.
Display birthdays from Address Book
iCal has a great feature - it can automatically display the birthdays you entered in Address Book in iCal. Doing so, you will never forget a birthday again.
Open the iCal Preferences via the application menu.
In the preferences, check the box to automatically show birthdays entered in Address Book.
This gives you all-day events for every birthday on the according dates.
So while you are using iCal to plan your schedule, you automatically see your friends birthdays, which you entered when you created their contact in Address Book.
This is only one of the many interactions that Apple programs have with each other. We will explore many more in the future.
iCal has of course many more things to offer, which we will cover later on. There is also a very easy way to synchronize your calendar and contacts to your mobile phone (if supported) to have all your appointments and contacts available, even when you are not in front of your Mac.
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Tags: birthdays, iCal, planning, schedule
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