iCal Review

Although Apple is building an ever-increasing level of functionality into Mac OS X itself - witness the system-wide Address Book and Sherlock 3 - Apple recently announced a new application called iCal.

iCal is a simple single-window calendar that should fill the needs of many consumers. It supports multiple calendars (such as one for each member of a family), and can publish calendars and subscribe to them via .Mac or any other WebDAV server. iCal is a free download from Apple and it will require Mac OS X 10.2. <http://www.apple.com/ ical/>

The product most likely to suffer from iCal's release is Microsoft's Entourage. Although my impression is that Entourage is a more capable calendar, it lacks extensive sharing capabilities and is aimed at the individual user, leaving it vulnerable to iCal. Sharing is key - as Jobs noted in the keynote, we all have calendars, and there's almost no point in having a calendar if you can't share it with the other people affected by your schedule.

Users can "publish" their iCal calendars on the web, so colleagues, friends and family members can "subscribe" and view them in iCal on their own Mac®. In addition, iCal can automatically check for updates to imported calendars on a regular basis, so shared calendars are always up to date.

"iCal lets you see all the calendars that make up your life," said Steve Jobs, Apple's CEO. "With built-in Internet sharing, iCal opens a new era of wide-area calendar sharing between colleagues, friends, family and schools."

With iCal, Mac users can:

• keep track of schedules, appointments and tasks, viewing activities by day, week or month;
• manage and view multiple calendars at once from within one unified window to easily identify schedule conflicts or free time at-a-glance;
• publish calendars on the web to share with colleagues, family and friends;
• subscribe to other calendars to keep up with work schedules, family events, school events and more;
• send standards-based email event invitations;
• organize and keep track of activities with built-in To Do list management;
• be notified of upcoming events on screen, by email or text messaging to a mobile phone or pager; and
• quickly find any event, task or name entered into iCal using its lightning-fast search tool.

Our take is that iCal will be as much of a hit as the rest of Apple's iApps. It's hard to beat a free program that offers much-needed functionality, especially when it comes from Apple.

Parts reprinted with permission from TidBITS TidBITS has offered more than ten years of thoughtful commentary on Macintosh and Internet topics. For free email subscriptions and access to the entire TidBITS archive, visit www.tidbits.com.