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Upgrades Businesses Software Utilities (Apple) Apple

Apple Releases Updated iCal 1.5.1 92

Posted by pudge from the coolio dept.
An anonymous reader writes "iCal 1.5.1 is easier and faster use with its enhanced Info Drawer, To Do alarms and notes, and more keyboard short cuts. iCal 1.5.1 also includes improved time zone support and personalized calendar colors. You can visit the iCal homepage. Also, if you synchronize you'll need the latest iSync 1.2.1 for it to work with the new iCal." You can also update via Software Update, of course, and you need to update iCal before iSync.
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Apple Releases Updated iCal 1.5.1 More

Apple Releases Updated iCal 1.5.1

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  • Software update (Score:5, Informative)

    by Mark Hood ( 1630 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:35AM (#7172741) Homepage
    will automatically present you with them in the correct order - i.e. when you first update it ONLY shows you iCal.

    Next time, you'll get the chance to download iSync.

    Neither needs a reboot.

    Mark

  • Drop the drawers... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Incongruity ( 70416 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:42AM (#7172855)
    iCal 1.5.1 is easier and faster use with its enhanced Info Drawer

    No it's not.

    I really don't see the value in having a "drawer" that isn't always attached to the primary (calendar) window but is there often enough that I have to keep that main window smaller in order to see the drawer when it is there. The alternative is to move the window because the drawer appears all but off-screen when I double click on any item/appointment in the calendar. (it used to bring up a small window that could be moved/resized inpendent of the main window.) I don't see the UI wisdom in forcing this on people -- there's no pref. to use to old windowing style and that is a real flaw, IMHO.

    -tcp

    • After using it for about 30 seconds, I have to agree. Hopefully there will be enough noise that Apple will "un-fix" this.

    • Re:Drop the drawers... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sg3000 ( 87992 ) * <sg_public AT mac DOT com> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @11:05AM (#7173169)
      I prefer the drawer. The pop up window was an annoyance, particularly because you couldn't see enough information. First you type in the info, then you click the pop-up menu to set the alarm, and then you click the popup menu to write a note. Inputing a meeting was a six step process. Now, with the drawer, I can see all the info at once, without dealing with that floating window. And, it doesn't use up more desktop space.

      Of course, I've got a 17" PowerBook, so I've already got a surplus of desktop space anyway.

      • Re:Drop the drawers... (Score:5, Informative)

        by greenhide ( 597777 ) <jordanslashdot@@@cvilleweekly...com> on Thursday October 09, 2003 @11:14AM (#7173292)
        Yeah, well, they could always have gone ahead and made a pop-up window with the same layout as the info drawer.

        I hate slide out drawers. They're not intuitive at all. They're eye candy based. That's my main gripe with Camino -- bookmarks and history have to be accessed from a side drawer.

        It breaks the system because you either have to purposefully make your window narrower, or the side bar will be offscreen when it "pops up" (or out, rather). Also, because it's on the side, it doesn't have a featured focus. When I first tried adding an event using 1.5, I doubled clicked to create an event, and wondered why the info window wasn't showing up. Because the drawer was opening to the side, I didn't notice it because I wasn't looking for it. In any case, most of the drawer was offscreen, because I didn't know that I was supposed to provide space on the left for it to show up.

        If someone can give me an example of a side drawer that really makes sense and is more useful than a floating pop-up window, please let me know.
        • I love the drawer in Mac's Mail program. It keeps all of my folders and email accounts right at my fingertips. Since I leave it open all the time, I don't have the issue with it popping out the side of the screen, though.
          • Okay, yeah....I was just realizing that I use the "mailboxes" window all the time in Eudora, which is *kind of* like a drawer.

            However, in both of these cases, it's being used for navigation and organization, much like a finder listing. In those cases, it makes sense. I don't think it makes sense when you're looking at a single item.
        • The main problem, for me at least, is not the drawer but the resolution of most of apples machines. 1024X768 is much too small in my opinion.

          Anyway, as far as Camino goes, it hasn't used a drawer in quite a while. The bookmarks and history work similar to safari. That might be in the nightly builts, though. Of course it's gotten much better since .7
        • That's my main gripe with Camino -- bookmarks and history have to be accessed from a side drawer.

          FYI, that's been changed in recent releases. They made the old bookmarks sidebar act more like the bookmark thing in Safari. Its really pretty nice.
        • I agree with everyone about how annoying the slide-out window is. We need either (1) an option to make it a popup window again, or (2) for the calendar to auto-shrink if the drawer pops off the screen side.

          It's keeping me from switching from Palm Desktop, which I'd dearly love to do. (That old rebranded Claris Organizer is still a solid old bugger of a program.)

          Also, I can't figure out how to color-code my Palm categories. Palm Desktop, for instance, lets you specify all Travel events as Blue and Work m

        • What? When you slide out the drawer in Camino the window automaticly gets narrowed down just enough for the drawer to fit on the screen. When you hide the drawer the window returns to its original size. I always wondered why Mail didn't work the same way.

        • If someone can give me an example of a side drawer that really makes sense and is more useful than a floating pop-up window, please let me know.

          How about viewing a document's properties? The information in the drawer is specific to the document, so having a display that's "locked" onto the document window makes perfect, intuitive sense. If the property information was in a floating window, it wouldn't be visually linked with one particular document window. It's the same idea as a sheet, only modeless, sin

        • That's funny . . . I have a "Bookmarks" menu right at the top of my screen. Oddly enough--and this may just be a coincidence--all of my bookmarks are under it.

          So much for having to be accessed from a drawer. What's wrong with a menu?
        • The daily builds of Camino now use a sidebar instead of a drawer.
        • I hate slide out drawers. They're not intuitive at all. They're eye candy based. That's my main gripe with Camino -- bookmarks and history have to be accessed from a side drawer.
          The side drawer in Camino is gone now. Check the nightly build.

        • It breaks the system because you either have to purposefully make your window narrower, or the side bar will be offscreen when it "pops up" (or out, rather).

          This isn't necessarily true in Aqua. Although it's a little more work, it is possible to program the window to shrink by the required amount to keep the drawer on screen, then expand back to its original size when the drawer is put away. IIRC, Camino/Chimera used to do this with their old bookmark drawer (it's now Safari-style, in-window)

    • It works fine on my desktop machine, since the drawer expands onto the second monitor.

      On my iBook, on the other hand, I'm left with having to have the window much smaller than I would like to leave room for the drawer.
    • Agreed. Unless they can implement the auto-resize of the main window to accomodate the drawer (a la, camino), don't even bother.

      Personally, I rarely catagorize entries, nor need to use the little macro-calendar in the bottom left. I would like to see the whole left side section be collapsible. If I had that real estate back, I wouldn't mind the drawer on the right. FYI, 14" iBook, and annoyed at drawers size...

    • I also have to agree. I'm still using a 15" CRT, and the slide out window doesn't work well when the iCal window is normally full screen. It's a little better with the To-Do list window turned off, but it still makes everything cramped. Time to use that "Provide iCal Feedback" option.

    • I like the drawer, but it slides out on the left side, while every other OSX app which uses drawers slides to the right... thats pretty annoying!
      • Try moving the window so that the open drawer is off the edge of the screen. Now close and open the drawer. It should open on the side which has room for it. This works for most of the apps I use.
    • Agreed. Bad design. Bad bad bad design.

  • Poor Interface Design Gets Worse (Score:5, Informative)

    by positive ( 12069 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @10:48AM (#7172924)
    Like many other people, I've had problems with iCal's interface from the start. I had hoped for some usability improvements with this upgrade but it seems to have actually gotten worse! Instead of the popup window to show details/information for an event, there is now a drawer that slides out from the side of the main window. The problem with this is that the tray is HUGE. If you keep your iCal window zoomed (like I assume most people do), you don't even realize at first that the drawer has slid out because it is completely off the screen. The solution to this is to make the main iCal window narrower, compressing the already-small calendar view even further. I have no idea why they chose to design the program this way, but I guess I'll keep hoping for the right changes in the NEXT version.

    • The zooming problem with drawers is system-wide--in Jaguar.

      In Panther, which comes out in 14 days, drawers are considered when zooming a window, so there's no off-screen erratic behavior.

      Also in Panther, you can attach keyboard shortcuts to menu items, such as the Zoom item in iCal's Window menu. Now, with a quick ctrl-z on my PowerBook, any window is zoomable. Mail's drawer works fine, iCal's drawer works fine. Any app's drawer works fine.

  • What happened to iCal 1.5.0?
    • 1.5.0 was last seen in Panther Beta 7b85.

      I love x.x.1 releases. Reminds me of the time when everybody was waiting for System 7. (And yes, that wait *was* long.) On one occasion I saw someone wearing a t shirt with "I am waiting for System 7.0.1" on it...

  • Sync with P800 - anyone? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by capmilk ( 604826 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @11:03AM (#7173149)
    In theory, iSync and iCal now sync with Sony Ericsson's P800 phone. In theory...

    I did get the contacts syncronized, but was not lucky at all with calender dates. iSync always ends up with "NSRangeException: [NSCFString substringWithRange:]: Range or index out of bounds"

    Anybody got an idea what that is about?
    • Strangely, it works fine for me, but I'm using it under Panther (7b80). I've also recently updated the firmware of the P800.
    • I've seen some reports that suggest that there is a bug with calendar events that have a lot of text associated with them. Do your calendar events have long notes? This apparently breaks the sync.
    • Do you know of anywhere where you can actually use a P800? I'd like to play with one before I get a new phone. None of the Cell providers seem to have them, at least not near me.

    • NSRangeException: [NSCFString substringWithRange:]: Range or index out of bounds</blockquote

      Ok, to break this down:

      NSRangeException - This is an exception raised by an error condition in Objective-C code, from the Next Step libraries (actually Cocoa, but it's descended from Next Step

      NSCFString substringWithRange: - The exception is raised when messaging the NSCFString class through the substringWithRange method

      Range or index out of bounds - either the number sent to the class was too large or

    • I had to remove my P800 from the bluetooth config and then re-pair it.

      Now it works fine.

      Slow down cowboy! Error messages should not be patronising.

  • I submitted this as feedback for the first version of iCal. Guess it didn't make it.

    iCal doesn't support WebDAV in digest mode, so your password is passed in cleartext. Digest mode may not be the strongest encryption, but some is WAY better than none.

    Of course you could mount the WebDAV disk in digest and just copy it over, but that's not the easy integration Apple promotes. And even then, don't try it in the Finder...
    • Basic authentication does at least encode the password via Base 64. It is not at the level of Digest, but both are still pretty weak compared to using SSH/SSL.

    • No, digest does work (Score:3, Informative)

      by mughi ( 32874 )
      iCal doesn't support WebDAV in digest mode, so your password is passed in cleartext.

      That must just be some problem with your implementation. A few months ago I setup WebDAV on a linux box just for supporting my iCal. I switched to digest and all non-digest access was properly blocked, but iCal had no problems using it.

  • Publish to multiple places.

    Anyone have an internal work calendar and an external work calendar that would like them to be the same without duplicating each entry?

    Multiple authors.

    My wife(yes, I have one) & I share a family calendar, but only she can write to it. Isn't multiple authors the point of WebDAV?

  • Time zone support is a big improvement (Score:5, Informative)

    by nickovs ( 115935 ) on Thursday October 09, 2003 @11:36AM (#7173613)
    As a frequent traveller the biggest benefit for me from this release is the proper support for time zones.

    You need to tick a box in the preferences panel to enable it but once on you get to specify the time zone as well as the time of the meeting (it defaults to the zone set for the clock). The display presents the time of the meeting in the view time zone, which also defaults to the zone for the clock. Dinner next Tuesday in Boston is showing up for me as 1AM on Wednesday because I still have my clock set for here in the UK. It now also seems to properly support timed events that span more than one day.

    I sent in a feature request for exactly this six months ago. I'm sure that I was not the only one but it's gratifying to see that they listen to their customers :-)

  • Finally! (Score:3, Informative)

    by inertia187 ( 156602 ) * on Thursday October 09, 2003 @12:08PM (#7174022) Homepage Journal
    Finally, an Apple Update that doesn't require a reboot! My uptime has been preserved.
  • Hi,

    does anyone know if this version finally supports the categories of the palm pda?

    didn't work in the last version, on hotsync all entries from the palm would go into one calendar in ical. No possibility to seperate business an private entries.

    Greetz

    robert

    • does anyone know if this version finally supports the categories of the palm pda?

      It still does not seem to support Palm categories.

      I, for one, like the new iCal better than the previous version. I find the info drawer an improvement, but I have a cinema display, so width isn't an issue.

      iCal still isn't everything I would hope for. In addition to the category gripe I also want more (or even any) control over the display of To Do items. I'll continue to vacillate between iCal and Palm Desktop, while

  • Still Buggy (Score:2, Informative)

    by lordDallan ( 685707 )
    I just experienced a problem with iCal (1.5.1) where all the menu items worked as well as some push button controls, but the calendar itself, all appointments, and the mini-calendar on the left part of the screen would not respond.

    This problems persisted through quitting and re-starting iCal, but was solved by logging out and logging back in. Has anyone else experienced this?

    Also, you can add an attendee with no e-mail address as the first attendee, but any subsequent attendees (2..N) must have e-ma
  • iCal is an absolutely fabulous program. But, since I left my Mac at home when I went to college and couldn't afford a new one on a student's budget, I was wondering if there is an equivalent (functionality-wise and quality-wise) for Windows... Can anyone help out those of us who lack Macs? Thanks.
  • I'm pretty happy with all of these iApps that Apple kindly includes with the MacOS, but in my mind the biggest glaring omission is the ability to sync with a Windows PC running Outlook. Am I just being obtuse or is there not a real need, particularily for 'switchers' who are still mandated to use a PC at work?

    BTW, I know one way around this is to ferry a Palm between a PC and a Mac, but that's hardly a sensible solution. Particularly given that if both PCs and Macs support the Palm syncing protocol, SURELY

  • Panther 7b85 has iCal 1.5.1 but iSync 1.2.0, Software update does pick up iSync 1.2.1 on Panther though. The Drawer is great, its easier to get more work done, Camino's auto expanding trick would be a welcomed addition however. The pop up window was a pain because it disapeared when you clicked over to another application but still wanted to read your notes in iCal!!
  • The "feature" that bothers me the most is how the size of the window is tied to the view of the calendar you are using. If you resize the window in "week" view, for instance, as soon as you click "month" view the window snaps to the size it was last time you used "month" view.

    I think the main reason this bothers me is that the view controls are at the bottom of the window, so to go back to the previous view, I now have to go hunting for where the controls moved to.

    If they put the view-switching buttons

  • iCal 1.5.1 would be a real Entourage killer (in combination with AddressBook and Mail.app, of course) if Apple would implement recurring ToDo's. Reminders to pay the bills, etc., are the only think that remains in Entourage I can't live without.

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