Product Reviews

Given that Mac OS X comes with an address book and an email client, it's not too surprising that the next free application should be a diary and calendar. So, iCal, which was announced at Macworld Expo in New York in July, fills this obvious gap with aplomb, balancing ease of use with some good features.

The interface follows the chrome styling of iTunes and the rest, featuring a single window with room for daily, weekly or monthly diary views, as well as a to-do list and a calendar. You simply click and drag in a diary window to create a new event, and can attach alarms to it, add associated contacts and all the normal calendaring features.

Included with the email is a file which, when opened, will allow you to accept or reject the appointment, notifying the person that sent you the invite. If you accept, the meeting will be placed in your calendar.

This is a great system, and works well if you

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use both Apple's Mail client and iCal. However, if you use another email package, you will have problems. First of all, iCal insists on using Mail to send invitations, no matter what your default email package is. The other problem is that the message that accompanies invites says: 'Click on the link below to accept or reject this invitation.' This only works with clients that display attached files (which is all the invite is) in the main body of the message - such as, you guessed it, Mail. This means the message is totally confusing to anyone using Entourage, Outlook Express, or Eudora, as they won't see it 'below' at all.

Alarm bells

There are some nice touches to alarms, though. You can set an alarm to show a message on your Mac, or send an email, so you can get an alert to an email-capable phone, pager or wireless PDA. And performance, even on an older G3 Mac, is not bad.

A second key feature is the ability to publish calendars to an iDisk or any WebDAV-equipped Web server. This lets other users view your calendars, or subscribe to them and display them in their own iCal, and show or hide your calendar. But, it's a shame that you can't use the more common FTP protocol for uploading calendars, rather than WebDAV.

Overall, iCal has some nice features but it's quite clearly a first release with a few rough edges. But, for a free application, it is difficult to criticise too heavily. It won't replace Entourage for power users yet, but it's still well worth looking at.