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February 1, 2008

tips

Calendar widget keeps you on your toes, courtesy iCal

Posted Feb. 1, ’08, 10:51 AM PT by Aayush Arya
Category | Tips

Leopard Calendar widgetWe all know that Apple is a great fan of sneaking subtle features into their software. In Tiger, clicking on the left side of the calendar widget acted as a toggle for showing or hiding the month view section on the right. (Shocking, right? I know.)

Assuming that the visually unchanged calendar widget in Leopard would behave in exactly the same way, I clicked on it. Imagine my surprise when, instead of retracting itself, it actually sprouted another appendage, shamelessly displaying my extremely busy schedule (pictured above) for everyone to see.

After two whole seconds of straining my brain trying to figure out what had caused this completely unexpected and peculiar feature to present itself, I struck gold—it was displaying the scheduled events from my iCal database. Ah, the sweet smell of solving a mystery!

Jokes aside, I think this is a simple yet wonderful addition to the calendar widget. It lists the next three events from iCal, so whenever you’re wondering what you have to do in the next few hours, you can just hit F12 instead of looking for them in iCal. It’s the sort of feature that makes you wonder why it hadn’t been there in the first place.

Now, even though that’s all well and good, I am indeed quite miffed at the public humiliation this feature has made me suffer. Apple had no right to compromise my routine when I least expected them to. I think I just might sue them. Word on the street is that it’s in fashion these days and Apple is the hot target.


3 Comments

pumpkinwhite said:

This feature is great, but unfortunately it has a HUGE bug, which makes it all but useless. And that is that it somehow refuses to show repeating all-day events. Whether they are weekly, monthly or annually repeating all-day events. As soon as i set a repeat to an existing all-day event, it vanishes from the dashboard like it never existed. Maybe Apple doesn't want us to be boringly regular!! Thanks Apple.

February 1, 2008 1:02 PM
Jesus Franco said:

Thanks for that info, just tried it and it has a pretty slick animation as well.

And yes you should sue Apple :p

February 1, 2008 1:04 PM
Jean-Charles Prabonneau said:

The "iCal events" widget does a great job at showing events.
I modified it a little bit to change the display parameters (smaller fonts, etc.) and it's pretty useful. It even includes locales.

All-day events don't look so great on it but you can't be perfect.

http://benkazez.com/icalevents.php

February 2, 2008 7:26 AM

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