A few days ago, Merlin Mann mentioned on his 43 Folders site that he’d be interested in a small enhancement for iCal. Out of the box, iCal only adds an alarm to events if you manually add it – strange behavior, considering a calendar is the tool to alert us to upcoming events. He asked for automatic creation of those alarms.
At the same time, I was looking to delve a bit deeper into OSX programming. And it was also sufficiently small that I could turn it into an experiment on productivity.
Since no bugs surfaced since then – with a widespread test release on three machines
– I’m ready to release it into the wild. Comments, suggestions, questions are welcome at rob [dot] blum [at] gmail [dot] com.
Without further ado, here is iCalFix 0.1
Update: iCalFix 0.3 released!
Tags: osx, iCal, plugin development
wow! a very nice plugin to fix such a strange omission from iCal. Any chance you can allow the user to specify the default alarm time? Can I just make an edit in the .plist? I would prefer it to default to one hour before the event, not one day.
Will be there in v0.2. Scheduled for mid-January
This is a great little tweak – and it just reinforces what I love about os x users and developers. Whatever’s missing quickly (well… sometimes eventually) seems to find a solution.
brilliant, thank you. I can’t believe this isn’t built into iCal already. I’ve been this close to switching to entourage many times, and you just saved me!
Is there anyway to adjust the snooze option for timers? I can’t stand the current choices. Sometimes I want to snooze 5 minutes, sometines 4 hours, etc. I’m stuff with what Apple decided is appropriate.
You are a god among men! Thank you!
If I had a mac, I’d check it out. What i’m really wondering though is how you managed to do this on a closed source app with no api. any possibility of either releasing source, or at least a basic outline of how it was done?
Any chance of open-sourcing it? I’m curious as to how you did this.
Gah! It uses SIMBL! Run! Run for the hills! (IIRC, SIMBL is kind of like APE – you either can live with these things, or they make you extremely paranoid at every OS X update time).
I’ve also heard negative things about SIMBL. Can someone with more expertise than I tell me if SIMBL can produce bugs? Is it likely? Thanks!
so now i’d like to print my 2006 calendar pages and put them in my looseleaf notebook, but there is apparently no option for portrait-style pages, onlly landscape. Is there a way around this? dolly – dmzx3 [at] comcast [dot] net
Will this work for birthdays as imported from Addressbook? Currently there is no way that I know of to be reminded of birthdays.
Well, since suggestions seem to be the rule of the day, if you choose an event to be an all day one and want an alarm, the alarm defaults to 12 midnight. Anyway to change that to something a bit more reasonable?
Such a great addition to iCal. Thanks a lot for your time. This makes me want to learn to write plugins!
Since you can only set the amount of time to 24 hours this is useless. I still have to change the alarm every time I create a new event. Couldn’t it default to the last setting used? So if I change it to 2 hours it will use that until I next change it? Or at least put the setting in the plist file, so we can change it ourselves. Anyway great start. Thanks,
Anyone… How can I print, on one page, both my day calendar with timed events and my TO-Do list right beside it? I just want to print this out and stick it in my pocket to review throughout the day. Any help out there?
For the next update please default to the last alarm settings used. I didn’t realize it didn;t do that until a few appointments had been made. Thanks!
Where do you plan on announcing updates? I’d like to be notified when 0.2 comes out.
Thanks for your hard work.
Thanks! I’m happy to see this, even though I would prefer a 1hr default alarm instead of 1 day. Another feature I’d really love: the ability to add one or more alarms to events in the “birthdays” calendar. I can’t believe Apple didn’t build this in, since it makes the birthday calendar useless without it! If you can make that happen I will bow down in worship to you.
Thanks but I totally agree with n8. With the new iCal 2.0 integration with Address Book Birthdays….well this is cool…but once the Apple address book puts the new birthdays in iCal there is no way to edit them. Thus there is no way to turn on a reminder. Which is kinda useless. Reminders within the apple integrated address book/iCal would be SOOOOOOOO useful…and yes you would be a god!
Nice bundle!
Since you are changing the way you set the alarm, it would be nice to allow the capability to put an alarm after an event, not only before…
Thanks!
Hi Andrea! Alarm times will indeed allow alarms after an event. (Well, if iCal allows it). I’m not sure why you would want that, but since it requires no extra work
, it will be included in 0.2.
I can’t wait to start using this, but can’t find where it should go? It says ” That has become much easier now – just drag the iCalFix folder into the InputManagers shortcut – or onto your /Libraries/InputManager folder” but Spotlight doesn’t seem to see this InputManagers folder. I am on OSX.4.7. Thanks!
Does it also add alarms to the automatically created birthday calendar?
Haven’t figured out how to do those yet, but I’d definitely like to support that…
This is a neat tool, I will have to try it out. The one thing that is preventing me from moving over to iCal completely (dumping MS Entourage) is its poor handling of “To-Do” items. This is how I keep track of my life – everything that isn’t considered an actual appointment becomes a “To-Do”. The one thing missing is the ability to categorize tasks the way Entourage and Outlook do. If you have a lot of them like I do, a lack of categorization turns it into quite a long and messy list. I don’t like to put due dates on most of them, so I need the categories. The ability to link them to another local file is really helpful as well. If anyone knows of an iCal plugin that does this, please send it my way – sundevil(six-seventy-one (in numerals) AT mac DOT com. Thanks!
Perhaps I should add, it would be great to be able to type in Quicksilver.
“ictdo make supper remind 20 minutes” Adds a TODO with a reminder in 20 minutes to make supper.
it would be fantastic if someone could change the Alarm/Email to allow custom addresses to be put in. That way way you could set up reminders for not just yourself, but to other people as well.
If someone knows of how to do this, please pass on the knowledge. Thanks!
This is such a great update to iCal. I don’t understand why this is not in the program inherently. Thank you so much for creating this!!
OK. It pays to reaad the directions carefully!! Be sure that you copy the iCalFix directory into InputMangers, not just the bundle!
Cheers
New version 0.6 released http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2007/03/14/icalfix-06
Thanks for the great software!
Excellent. It would be even better if I could receive a mail in imail besides the alarm. Thanks.
Thanks, I really need this feature!
How well does this work w/ Leopard iCal?
It doesn’t work with Leopard at all – Apple is deprecating an API I rely on. Then again, Leopard iCal does already automatically create alarms for you.
I am looking for a plugin that will modify the “attendees” field in the info panel of a calendar event to display the address, phone and email from the Address Book.
Could this also be part of an update?
I am using iCal 4.06 on OS X 10.4.11
Thanks!
Hey, Robert….
Just out of curiosity…
What API were you using that  deprecated on you? Just for my own education, if you get around to answering….
Robert,
Since upgrading to leopard I get the next remark every time I open ical.
iCal(v1236) is not supportted by iCalfix 0.6.1(70). Your version of iCalfix seems out of date. Please update to the newest version.
I cannot find a newer version and I don’t know how to unstall iCalfix. Please advice. Michael,
Error message: iCal(v1236) is not supportted by iCalfix 0.6.1(70) on every opening of Ical. please advice
@Michael, @Dick: iCalFix is not supported under Leopard
I’ve tentatively started working on a new approach
Any chance of open-sourcing it? I’m curious as to how you did this.
@juju:
I probably won’t open-source the entire thing – it contains Apple APIs that I reverse-engineered, and I don’t even want to start tempting the dragon.
There is an overview of the basic ideas behind this at http://www.robertblum.com/articles/2006/01/09/the-making-of-icalfix – and if you have any other questions, don’t hesitate to ask.
This is great! What about the possibility of a plugin/extension that allows iCal to show/include travel time in events–like what Entourage does…? Any possibilities there? I’d write one myself, except that I have NO idea what I’m doing.
Good afternoon If I were you though, I wouldn’t become dependant on it….I just did it that once, and that was it…I had a roomate who became mentally dependant on it (and that came out to be expensive too) wholesale Goodluck!!!
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Is there any chance I can talk you into adding another feature to ical? Would it be possible to make an option in the print preferences to remove the time next to events? It is an option in the normal view mode but for some reason apple made it so you can’t turn it off when you print.
Thanks.
I notice that when I log out or shut down and log back in to my Mac, all the ical Alarms that were active before have disappeared. I like them to stay until I clear them manually. Does your plugin make them stay? Entourage does this.
I was wondering if you ever thought of changing the layout of your website? Its very well written; I love what youve got to say. But maybe you could a little more in the way of content so people could connect with it better. Youve got an awful lot of text for only having one or 2 pictures. Maybe you could space it out better?