Recently , I had the responsibleness of put for several pieces of piece of furniture , 20 boxes of book , more Mac peripherals than I get laid what to do with , a refrigerator , a idiot box , and two irritable CAT to be relocate some 370 mile from Los Angeles to my novel root of operations in Alameda County . In pull off this ill-tempered - state move , I have found the three most worthful tools to have at my garbage disposal are bubble - wrap , a reputable move house , and iCal . The bubble - wrapper lessens the jeopardy of my breakables … well , breaking . The reputable moving house has the experience , skill , and muscularity to move large , bulky items that me and my spindly , little arms can not . And Apple ’s modest calendaring app turns out to be a nice little tool for making certain the gearing run on fourth dimension .
The instant I found out about the move — about five week from Zero Hour — I launched iCal and created a Moving calendar to go alongside my existing calendars for Work , Travel , Due Dates , and other variety . Then I started produce events with due dates — when I needed to cancel public utility company at the onetime place , when I take to jell up utilities at the newfangled topographic point , when assorted kitchen paraphernalia needed to be packed , and so forth . I used iCal ’s alarm have to cue me of specific upshot , set up a laundry list of items in the To Do listing pane , and made extensive use of the Priority options to remind myself which deadline could luxate by a day or two and which absolutely , positively needed to be completed at the appointed sentence . And it work like a appealingness — this was believably my easiest move ever , and I say that as someone who ’s bounced up and down the California coast like a floater since 1990 .
Maybe it would have worked out just as well had I used a traditional paper calendar . But there ’s something about launching iCal first thing in the morning and see your tasks and to - dos in all their multi - color glory that help one focus the mind . And nothing — not a aristocratic reminder , not a note jotted down on a Charles William Post - It , not even a minatory spotlight from the missus — can goad me to action quite like the plenty of a checkbox on my iCal To - Do tilt turning into a triangle with an ecphonesis fall guy ( the app ’s way of separate me that I ’m ridiculously behind schedule ) . It ’s borderline Pavlovian .
So even though I ’ve long considered iCal a nifty little puppet , whether it ’s navigate a cross - state move or just managing my day - to - day affairs , but I ’ve had my gripes about older versions of the app . In particular , I ’ve been stupefy by iCal 1.5.5 ’s inability to deal older calendar .
countenance ’s consider that move calendar I assure you about a yoke paragraph ago . It was super helpful back when I was managing a move — but now that I ’m situated in Northern California , that calendar has served its purpose . And yet , in version 1.5.5 , it would posture there in the left - hired man pane of my iCal windowpane , wait for novel issue that will never be added . The same thing goes with a calendar I keep of the Oakland Athletics ’ 2005 schedule — once the A ’s finish play out the train this Sunday , that particular calendar hurtles into obsolescence . ( And , when it ’s time to add the 2006 docket next spring , what am I supposed to do ? clutter up up the left - helping hand pane of iCal with an ever - spread out number of green A ’s calendars ? )
Now I could simply delete all these no - longer - relevant calendars , bump off them and their to - dos from iCal evermore . But I ’m one of those people that likes a carefully preserved record of what I was doing on a particular day — who ’s to say I wo n’t need an easy accessible way to reassert that , why yes , I was busy displace out of my apartment on September 6 , 2005 at some point in the future ?
There was a way to sort of do this with iCal 1.5.5 , but it ’s not the most elegant solution in the world . You select the calendar in question and employ iCal ’s Export feature , saving the calendar with a unique name ( Sept05 LA Move , for example ) . Then just delete the original calendar from iCal . This will withdraw outdated calendars from the left - hand back breaker ( yea ! ) but it will also remove them from your iCal record ( boo!)—though you may always restore them by using the Import feature . Effective — but not exactly the at - a - glimpse record of my life that I ’m hoping to keep .
So what ’s a record - retention overzealous like myself to do ? Just upgrade to Tiger .
With substantive young features like spot and Dashboard grabbing most of the tending , the update version of iCal in Mac OS X 10.4 has been largely overlooked . Among the changes in iCal 2.0 ( which you’re able to translate all about inMacworld’sTotal Tigerissue ) are features for managing coming together , heighten print functionality — and , of particular interest to me , the power to group calendars into folderlike subsets .
So , old , out - date calendars about just - completed moves and baseball game schedule cluttering up my iCal interface ? All I have to do in iCal 2.0 is hit Command - switching - N to produce a newfangled calendar grouping ( which I ’ve dubbed “ Dead Calendar Office ” ) . Then I drag the antediluvian calendars into that pamphlet , and fall into place on the pointer to the left to make them disappear — consequence information remain in the main calendar window ( though I can make that scarce , too , by clicking on the check - boxful next to those item-by-item calendar ) .
It ’s a great plus to a program that already serve the mass of my programming needs . And because of it , I expect the next major sprightliness outcome to hail along — oh man , notanothermove — to incline even more smoothly .
