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John Maisey is your iLife friend.
 

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Get your dates together

John Maisey has updated Dates to iCal 2

John Maisey is your iLife friend. He's upgraded and improved his great program for Dates to iCal 2. Dates to iCal 2 is a replacement for Apple's birthday calendar for iCal in Leopard. It has a range of features to allow the user to choose what, and what not, to sync to iCal from Address Book.

As well as automatically syncing birthday dates from Address Book, Dates to iCal 2 can sync anniversaries and custom dates. It provides the option of filtering to a group set up in Address Book, the user could use an already existing Address Book group, or could add one specifically for the purpose.

By default the title of the calendar is set to the the user's localisation of the word 'Anniversary'. This could be changed to the name of an already existing writeable calendar in iCal, or to any other text desired.

Dates to iCal 2 enables up to five alarms for each synced date in iCal. There is the option of message, sound, email and 'open file' alarms with the possibility of setting different alarms for birthdays and anniversaries.

This application also allows for the titles of the events sent to iCal to be modified using a dragable 'token' system. There are tokens for 'first name', 'last name', 'nickname', 'type' and 'age'. The preferred event title format can be created with text including these tokens. The tokens are replaced in iCal by the relevant Address Book card's information.

Dates to iCal is activated by saving it to the boot drive, then making the settings desired in the application (settings are divided into 'General', 'Titles' and 'Alarms' tabs), choosing 'Activate' under the 'General' tab and then quitting it. Users with a large number of dates in Address Book may prefer to quit iCal before activating Dates to iCal, as iCal can become unresponsive for a few seconds following large numbers of events being added. Dates to iCal will then automatically be launched in the background when required to ensure the 'Anniversary' calendar in iCal is in sync with updates in Address Book.

Dates to iCal 2 is shareware, registration is £3 per machine. After a three week demo period it will prompt to be registered. It requires OSX 10.5 with iCal and Address Book.

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John Maisey is an independent software developer based in London, UK. He has been programming for over 18 years and has been using Apple Macs to do so since 2000.

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Reviewed by Fred Showker for the User Group Network News Service. (C) 2008, all rights reserved. Affiliate groups may freely republish this piece so long as they include the tag line: "From the User Group Network News Service at http://www.user-groups.net/ " ... Event dates are subject to change. Some products, programs, or promotions are not available outside the U.S. Prices are estimated retail prices and are listed in U.S. dollars. Product specifications are subject to change. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Power Mac, Velocity Engine, FireWire, AirPort, Safari, Sherlock, QuickTime, iLife, iTunes, iChat, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD, iCal and Apple Store are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners. Mention of third-party products is for informational purposes only and constitutes neither a recommendation nor an endorsement.

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