The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

iCal is the calendar software that ships with every Mac. When combined with a MobileMe account, it's quite handy. In fact, iCal is the only calendar I use.

New users are often unaware of how much iCal can do. In this post, I'll focus on the types of alarms you can create. With a few simple steps, you can go beyond a simple beeping message.

First, create a new event. Simply double-click the proper time on the proper day and an hour-long event appears. Double-click the event, and the edit window appears. From here you can name your event, identify the location and duration (all day vs. timed), set repeat options and the target calendar if you maintain more than one (I don't).

Now for the fun part. Below the calendar option you'll see "Alarm." Clicking it reveals several options:

1. None (kind of self-explanatory)
2. Message (presents a dialog box on your Mac and iPhone/iPod touch if synced via MobileMe)
3. Message with sound (same as above with plus a system sound)
4. Email (send an email message to a given address)
5. Open file (Open a file on your Mac)
6. Run Script (My favorite. See below)

The first three are self-explanatory. When selecting a message and/or system sound, you have to option to display it minutes, hours or even days before or after the event. Likewise, you can chose any system sound you like.

The email option is nice as well. For instance, once the mini at my day job has completed its daily task, I have it send me an email as a confirmation. As long as I see that message, I know that everything's A-OK.

The option to open a file is handy, too. I'm using it to open a Keynote file right now, but you can have it launch a kiosk application, perhaps a broadcast app like Nicecast, etc.

Finally is run script. I'll be the first to admit that I'm not Applescript pro, but even I see the powerful potential here: Have iCal run any script you can write up at any time. Awesome! Finally, you can set more than one alarm to an event. For example, display a message and send me an email, just to be sure I make that meeting.

As you see, iCal can do much more than store your appointments. Now go be productive and have fun!

As promised, Steve's medical leave ended with the month of June. Last January, Apple announced that CEO Steve Jobs would take a leave of absense to deal with medical issues for approximately six months. Since then, we've learned that Steve had a liver transplant and today Apple confirmed his return.

"Steve Jobs is back to work. He is at Apple a few days a week and working from home the other days," Apple spokesman Steve Dowling said. "We're glad to have him back."

That's great news for the company and, more importantly, for Steve himself. There has been much noise about Steve during the past six months, including Apple's future without him, who might take over and the company's obligation to keep investors informed about the health of their CEO. Here's hoping the din dies down and that Steve continues to enjoy a long and productive career at Apple.

Last week I ordered my iPhone 3GS from the AT&T Store (no Apple Stores out here in the boonies). Five days later it was ready to be picked up and I drove out to the mall to get it.

While the AT&T employee activated it and performed the soul-stealing voodoo that accompanies a new sale, a woman at the next counter was exchanging her own AT&T phone (not an iPhone). I only heard a part of her conversation, but it went something like this:

"Can I use my old adapter with this one?"

"No, m'am. You'll have to buy a new one."

"What about my car charger?"

"No, that will need to be replaced, too."

"Ugh. OK. I'll just throw them away."

What a nuisance. She's got to spend extra money and those plastic and electronic doodads will occupy the bottom of a landfill until The End Of Days. The problem is even worse in the Europen Union. Fortunately, a group of manufacturers, including Apple, is working to change that. Apple, Nokia and Research in Motion have agreed to support a European Union-backed initiative to standardize these devices across the EU. It's a good idea that would benefit consumers and the environment.

The agreement is limited to smartphones for now, but if all goes well, will be expanded in 2012. Good luck to everyone involved.

Yesterday I wrote about my love of the Mac mini. So dependable and unobtrusive, it's the Honda Civic of computers. In the post, I briefly described how we use Dropbox to send routinely-updated Keynote files to the mini. A few of you wrote to ask for details, so I decided to share that information here on the blog. We use two pieces of software: Dropbox and iCal.

Dropbox

Here's the setup. First, the Mac mini is connected to the projector in the Projection Room above the theater via DVI. Every day, it runs a slideshow before the orientation film. That slideshow contains sponsorship information, museum news, etc.

It's updated once a week or so by someone in the art department (we'll call her "Janie"). Janie's desk is a couple hundred yards and two buildings away from the Projection Room. The Keynote file lives in a Dropbox folder that both Janie's PC and the mini can access. Of course, we don't want Janie editing the slideshow while it's running before a room full of guests. That's where iCal comes in.

iCal

We stop showing the film at 4:00 PM and Janie arrives for the day at 9:00 AM, so we set up two repeating iCal events.

The first event launches the slideshow in the morning. Every weekday at 8:45 AM (doors open at 9:00), there's a repeating iCal event with an alarm set to open the slideshow where it lives in Dropbox. Note that the show has been set to run at launch and loop indefinitely in Keynote.

What about updating? Easy. We stop running the slideshow at 4:00 PM and Janie leaves for the day at 5:00 PM. A second repeating iCal event has an alarm that runs the following super-simple Applescript:

Tell application "Keynote"
quit
End tell

The script does just what you expect -- it kills Keynote. This runs at 4:05 PM each weekday, and frees Janie to spend 10 or 15 minutes updating the file from her PC just before she goes home. The next morning, the first iCal event re-launches the slideshow and the cycle repeats.

That's how two free pieces of software (iCal and Dropbox) combine with an inexpensive, consumer level one to create a simple and effective solution to a problem. Best of all, it doesn't require a computer science degree or even a week with a giant manual. The iCal events and script are invisible to Janie. All she knows is, "I open the folder on my PC, change the slideshow, hit Save and I'm done." Sure, we could have dumped it on a central server, set up some sort of FTP voodoo that would have given Janie a headache, etc. But why? If the simple solution works, use it.

If you try something similar, let me know how it goes. Thanks to everyone who asked about this.

While the iPhone, iPod and laptops get most of the glory, the Mac mini chugs quietly along, doing its job well and making owners happy. Earlier at my day job, I was working with one of our minis and recognized how I rely on it to perform a critical function without the slightest hesitation. In other words, it's time to give the little guy some recognition.

When I'm not blogging for you folks, I'm managing the web presence and other tech goodies of a large museum here in balmy Massachusetts. When customers arrive in our lobby, they can view a slide show of what's new via a gorgeous HDTV hung above the ticket counter. Behind the HDTV is a Mac mini running Keynote. Once a week, the art department sends an updated Keynote presentation to the mini via Dropbox. This simple and reliable system is powered by an Intel-based mini.

Here's the best part. Before our guests move on to the exhibits, they view a brief orientation film and slide show that displays sponsor information. Thousands of people watch both the orientation movie and slideshow every week. Behind it all is a G4 Mac mini (pictured on the right*).

This machine has been absolutely rock solid. Again, the art department uploads new slide shows to it via Dropbox and the whole operation couldn't be simpler. When I look at the Laptop Hunter ads, and I see Lauren squealing over her Dell, I think, "Would I trust that machine to do what this mini does when it's 4 or 5 years old? Heck, no." The G4 in question is stock from the factory. Plus, if its HD croaks tomorrow, the only critical bit of data -- the slide show and movie -- lives on Dropbox so we're covered. In a pinch, we've got a Mac Pro that could take on the workload in under 10 minutes.

In a world where the new and shiny gets most of the attention, the plain and reliable is often overlooked. So here's a post to praise the Mac mini. The tiny, go-anywhere, do-anything, ultra-reliable computer that I absolutely love. No wonder there are racks full of them at Macminicolo and other facilities.

Now I'm certain there are others out there with dutiful minis. Home servers, media centers, carputers, etc. If that's you, send a snapshot to Flickr and tag it TUAWmini. We'll post some of our favorites this weekend.

*No, it doesn't live on the floor. I moved it to compose the shot. Rest assured that it was returned to its cozy shelf immediately after.

Welcome back to Mac 101, our series of posts aimed at novice Mac users and veterans who like the occasional refresher.

Mac OS X is equipped with a dictionary application that does pretty much what you'd expect, and a few things you might not. Here's how you can get the most out of Dictionary.

Most people use a dictionary to look up a word's definition. Doing so in Dictionary is pretty straightforward: Just launch the app, type your target term into the search field and hit return. That's all well and good, but not very interesting.

Here's what is. Click any word in the definition to find the meaning of that word. Do this just once, and an orange "Snap Back" icon appears in the search field. When clicked, it brings you back to your original search term.

Here's another cool trick. Let's say you looked up "Surname." Dictionary displays it broken up by syllable: "sur•name." If you highlight and copy it, it will paste as it should be written: "surname."

But wait, there's more! Highlight or position the cursor over a word in any Cocoa application (Safari, for example) and hit Control-Command-D. A small window appears that displays that word's definition and thesaurus alternative(s). If the term in question is the name of an Apple product, you'll see that product's official description from Apple. Clicking "More" at the bottom of this tiny window launches Dictionary.

Let's say you typically misspell a word that you have to type often (my Achilles' heel is "Twitterrific"). Simply right- or Control-click that word and select "Learn Spelling" to add it to Dictionary.

Dictionary is also more than a collection of definitions. You can quickly switch between a thesaurus, official descriptions of Apple products and Wikipedia. Additionally, select "Font/Back Matter" from the Go menu to access a slew of great information, like

• Proofreader's Marks
• The History of English
• Countries of the World
• Chemical Elements

Of course, every single word you find there can be clicked to reveal its definition. Finally, here's a bit of eye candy that isn't useful but still fun. You can browse every photo in Dictionary by navigating to

/Library/Dictionaries/New Oxford American Dictionary.dictionary/Contents/Images

and switching to Cover Flow view.

Late last week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Steve Jobs had a liver transplant in April. As of this morning, however, we still hadn't received confirmation from either Apple or any of the hospitals at which the procedure might have been performed. That's changed. Earlier today, Methodist University Hospital in Memphis released a statement confirming the surgery, with Steve's permission:

"I am pleased to confirm today, with the patient's permission, that Steve Jobs received a liver transplant at Methodist University Hospital Transplant Institute in partnership with the University of Tennessee in Memphis ... Our one-year patient and graft survival rates are among the best in the nation and were a dominant reason in Mr. Jobs's choice of transplant centers."

James D. Eason, M.D., Program Director at Methodist University Hospital's Transplant Institute, composed the statement and explained that Steve went through the typical transplant eligibility process; in order to receive a donor liver, he had to be the sickest person on the list when the matching organ became available.

This statement stands in contrast to the theories considered in today's New York Times piece about Steve's surgery, which noted that past preferential treatment for celebrities and wealthy patients has largely been ended but there are still ways in which someone with Jobs's resources could try to game the system. The Memphis transplant center has one of the shortest waiting periods in the US for liver patients.

Let us extend a "Well done" to the medical team and "Speedy recovery" to Steve.

A bit late to the party, I started the process of updating my iPhone at 3:00 PM Eastern. iTunes downloaded the update without a problem, but the install process was halted with the error message:

"The iPhone [your iPhone] cannot be updated at this time because the iPhone activation server is temporarily unavailable. Please try again later."

From there I've got two options: OK, which simply closes the dialog box, and More Information, which points a browser to a Knowledge Base article on iPhone activation issues. Mike also noted the appearance of an error -4 dialog earlier.

It looks to us like Apple's servers are getting slammed hard. A bit of patience ought to do the trick; you might also benefit from restarting both iTunes and your iPhone. Still, the whole thing makes me feel like Veruca Salt: "But I want an Oompa Loompa NOW!"

Last summer I started to fantasize about working for myself. I pictured a home office, afternoons with the kids and life as the boss. My employer maintained a similar fantasy, and a few months later they went out of business and left 120 of us high and dry. Synchronicity is cruel. Thanks for that, Carl Jung.

I've learned that working solo is 1 part thrilling, 90 parts horrifying and 9 parts educational. Also, I've found the best setup for my iPhone to help me through my self-employed day. Here I'll describe the apps, settings and hardware that I've found most useful. Feel free to share your own.

Read more →

Michael Flux has posted some pictures of Snow Leopard build 10A380, and there are some interesting things worth pointing out.

The stack frame now has a attractive border between it and the shadow which looks quite nice. Also, an option for folder actions now appears in the Finder's contextual menu.

There's a cool feature in Safari that lets you create a note from any selected text. I'm also happy to see that the Image Capture app no longer looks completely out of place and matches the other apps. Also, Preview's "Contact Sheet" view is very cool. Think of a PDF's pages being displayed in a big grid.

What's very nice to note, and what I'm most looking forward to, is the list of apps that Michael describes as looking the same but operating much faster, including Address Book and Font Book. I love what Apple's doing with this update in tidying up Leopard and making it tighter, faster and more efficient. I can't wait to buy this.