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The iCal widget

mmmdreg

mmmdreg

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Apr 14, 2002
1,393
0
Sydney, Australia
I'm sure this has come up a bit but I couldn't find it quick enough and got impatient and started a new thread. Anyway, back in the konfabulator days, I used iCal Events which was a truly beautiful widget. It was simple, looked nice stuck to the desktop, and got the job done well. Now as we all know by now, Apple's iCal widget seems to lack its most important feature - the iCal integration part. A quick google reveals R2ToDo as a fairly decent looking thing but it only does todo events. Another iCal Events seems to be the most visible solution to display iCal events.. however, each instance of the widget can only handle one calendar at a time. What happens if you have lots of calendars and not many events? See the attached image. It is silly. There needs to be a better solution. Does anyone know of a better widget?
 

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I haven't been able to find anything better either. I'm using the widget you showed a screenshot of. Not only do I wish you should display multiple calendars at once, but I also wish you could change the timeframe that gets displayed. Instead of just the next 24 hours it would be nice to select the next 2-3 days or the next week, month, etc. If there were numerous events you could just scroll through them.

I'm sure in time these widgets will become more robust - it hasn't even been out a month. I'm anxious too though. I got the "Today In History" widget very early and it didn't even update to the next day, you had to manually switch it every day or close and reopen the widget. (I don't reboot my Mac often.) However, there was an update recently and now it auto-updates day-to-day.
 
I think the simple answer to all of this is that the default widget is a Calander Widget. It's not an iCal widget. This may suck, but that's the way it is.
 
just so you know, the next release of konfabulator.. which is midnight tonight on the pacific coast... (2.0)... they have an iCal widget... their forums had some info on it i believe awhile back.. i am pretty sure it'll be there.. and for the windows users i think it has outlook compatibility.. konfabulator is still useful ;) more so than dashboard at this point.
 
robbieduncan said:
I think the simple answer to all of this is that the default widget is a Calander Widget. It's not an iCal widget. This may suck, but that's the way it is.
Click to expand...

This is true but Apple advertises an iCal widget as part of Tiger so it should be included.
 
iCal missing todo's

iCal will also not post todo's online with published calendar's, unless I am missing something. The data is there because I can use something instead like iwebcal and it publishes these just fine. I think iCal is just a low priority which is a shame because it has a lot of potential. I am waiting for the day that I can drop entourage. All I need is a program with mail and address book functionality which also lets me add project tags to emails, todos, and files. And I need to be able to attach files to something similar to project center. Please, please, please. And does anyone know a way to attach a tag to a message in mail?
 
mmmdreg said:
This is true but Apple advertises an iCal widget as part of Tiger so it should be included.
Click to expand...

I think it may have said something about iCal in the past but it now says (at http://www.apple.com/macosx/features/dashboard/):

"Calendar

This colorful widget gives you at-a-glance access to daily and monthly calendars. View the current day and date or click the calendar to reveal the days of the month."

No mention of iCal.

Edit to add:

The plot thickens. I did a google search for "iCal widget site:apple.com" and got this page http://www.apple.com/ca/macosx/newfeatures/newfeatures.html back. It's from the Tiger site that was up before Tiger was available. It says

"iCal Widget
Quickly view the current day, date, week and month, plus a list of events for each day based on your iCal calendar."

so it looks like things have changes from the advertised Tiger contents. Maybe Apple owe us all a refund?
 
I find the calendar widget pretty useless... as to I find the world clock. If I need to know the time, I look up at the corner. And if I need to know what day it is I look at the right corner and tells me that to. I need no stinking widget takeing 10 megs of ram for that! ;-). But a please bring back the to do list that Konfabulator's mini what to do list... I used it all the time, if someone makes a widget for it I'd gladly pay a shareware fee for it :)

http://www.widgetgallery.com/view.php?widget=35980
 
Another iCal feature that didn't make the cut

There's another thing that's missing:

iCal Events and System Menu Clock
View upcoming appointments directly from the date and time system menu.
Click to expand...
 
bkazez said:
Version 2.0 of the iCal Events widget is here! Multiple calendars in one widget, plus other features!

http://benkazez.com/icalevents/

Ben
Click to expand...
Very nice! It has all the features I was looking for in the update. I did notice it doesn't update on the fly when I'm adding new events. It updates as soon as I close iCal though. I didn't wait for very long to see if it would auto-update though. Regardless, this is a great update. Thanks for the hard work - it is appreciated.
 
this happens on the osxaudio.com forums too, and i think it's awesome. yay for developers. awesome widget, Ben.
 
Thanks for the widget. After having a Mac for all my life, I today decided I need to use iCal. Well anyways, I got all my stuff in there, and this widget looks really cool. Thanks again.
 
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