Calendar and Event Management

From Mac vs. Windows

Each operating system has its own built in solution for scheduling and tracking a user's events. Mac OS X's comes installed with iCal and Windows Vista comes with Windows Calendar. Both allow the user to schedule events/appointments, create to-do's, setup notifications, and share their calendars online.

Managing Calendars

Mac OS X

iCal supports multiple calendars each with their own events and to-do's. Checkboxes next to each calendar's name in the source list on the left of the window control whether the items from that calendar (events and/or to-do's) are visible within the main calendar view. Users can view their calendars by month, week, or day.

iCal is Mac OS X's default calendar and event scheduling application.

Calendars can be organized into groups. Click the triangle to the left of the group's name to reveal/collapse its calendars. Checkboxes also appear next to calendar groups. Checking/unchecking a calendar group's visibility box cascades across all calendars inside.

Organize calendars into groups based on their context

iCal features a special birthday calendar that user's must first enable under iCal > Preferences > General > Show Birthday Calendar. iCal uses the data from a user's Address Book and automatically creates entries for each of their contact's birthdays. Any updates in Address Book by the user will be reflected in iCal automatically.

In the bottom left corner of the iCal window, users have three buttons: create new calendar, mini-month, and notifications. The mini-month button slides open a miniature month view in the left hand source list with controls for navigating backwards to previous months or upcoming ones. Clicking the diamond shaped control snaps the user back to the current month.

By dragging the bar upwards one can view more then one month. Preview previous or upcoming months without leaving the current calendar in the main iCal window

Also at the bottom of the iCal window is a search box. User's can search events and.or to-dos they have created. Search can be limited to all content, titles, or specific fields such as location. Results appear in a box underneath the main calendar view and are updated in real-time as the user types. Filtering search results by a specific calendar is not immediately obvious. iCal's search will show results for all calendars that are set to be visible. To hide the results from other calendars, the user will need to uncheck their visibility box.

iCal lets a user search their events and to-dos across all their calendars

Results appear on the bottom.

Calendars can be published to a user's .Mac account or private WebDAV server and shared with others online. To subscribe to another user's iCal calendar, go to Calendar > Subscribe and enter its URL. Apple also lists a variety of online calendars users can subscribe to on their website -- go to Calendar > Find Shared Calendars.

Windows Vista

Windows Calendar allows for multiple calendars to be setup each with their own seperate appointments and to-dos. All available calendars appear under the “Calendars“ box in the left navigation pane with checkboxes to toggle the visibility of their items. Users can view the contents of their calendars by day, week, work week, or month.

Windows Vista Users can manage their schedule and appointments with Windows Calendar

Calendars can be organized into groups. This lets a user show/hide all the items for multiple calendars at once.

In the upper left portion of the Windows Calendar window is the date box which lets user select a day or month they wish to view. Browsing through this box isn't linear. Users can zoom out and browse by year, decade, or century.

Browse calendars by month, year, decade, or century in the Windows Calendar date box

Common tasks such as creating a new appointment or switching to another calendar view appear in the command bar at the top of the window. A search box is also present at the far right. Windows Calendar's searches the full contents of all appointments and to-dos. Results appear below the command bar as the user types.

There aren't many ways to filter search results. Only filtering options available are date calendar. Filtering options for the date can be selected from the drop down menu of the search box. To filter by calendar, users will need to uncheck the visbility box next to each calendar in the left navigation pane they do not wish to see results for.

Calendars can be published and shared with others online. Right-click on any calendar and select publish from the popup menu. To subscribe to another user's calendar, click the Subscribe button in the command bar and enter its URL.

Odds and ends

Mac OS X

Windows Vista

Windows Vista users can also download Windows Live Mail[1] from Microsoft. Other then just mail, it has a calender part also. In addition to having all the features that window calender has, it also has tighter integration with windows live calender online service for syncing your calander

Scheduling Events & To-Do's

Mac OS X

Events
To schedule a new event in iCal, click a day in the main calendar window and choose File > New Event or type CMD+N. The info window for the event will appear as either a floating dialog or a drawer that slides out from the window's side (user configurable). The info window lets users edit various details for an event:

• Location -- Where the event is located.
• Start and End Date -- Specify the date and time the event will take place on.
• Repeat -- Repeat the event on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly basis.
• Calendar -- If multiple calendars are setup in iCal, users will need to choose the calendar a event belongs to. An event cannot belong to multiple calendars.
• URL -- Lets the user specify a URL to a website on the Internet related to the event.
• Notes -- Free form text field the user can enter in additional details.

Alarms can be setup to occur for an event at a given time. Available alarm actions include having a message pop up on the screen, send an e-mail, open a file, or run a script. Event actions can occur before, on, or after the event's date.

Users can send an invitation to the event they are scheduling by dragging contacts from Address Book or entering an e-mail address. Click the send button at the bottom of the info window to attach the iCal event to an email message and send it. Users are unable to edit the contents of the invitation. If the user has iCal set to automatically retrieve invitations from Mail, events will appear under the notifications drawer in iCal's source list. Otherwise, user's will have to double-click on the iCal event attachment in the e-mail message. Attendees can choose to notify the organizer when accepting or declining an invitation.

Accepting an invitation in iCal

To-Do's
To-do's are different from events as they are tasks the user must complete. To-do's can be created by either double-clicking in the to-do window typing CMD+K. To-do items can also be created by dragging in an event from the calendar window. To-Dos can be sorted by calendar, title, priority, or due date.

Users can manage tasks and projects within iCal

Just as with events, to-dos have editable properties:

• Completed -- The current status of the to-do
• Priority level -- Very important, important, not important
• Due Date -- If the task is supposed to completed by a specific date, users can enter it here.
• Calendar -- If multiple calendars are setup in iCal, users will need to choose the calendar a to-do belongs to. An to-do cannot belong to multiple calendars.
• URL -- Lets the user specify a URL to a website on the Internet related to the to-do.
• Notes -- Free form text field the user can enter in additional details.

Windows Vista

Users can create appointments and to-dos in Windows Calendar.

Appointments
Events are called appointments in Windows Calendar. To create a new appointment, select a date in either the date box or the main calendar view and click “New Appointment” in the command bar. Double-clicking on an empty space in the main calendar view works, too. Windows Calendar stores the following information for an appointment:

• Location -- Where the event is located.
• Calendar -- If multiple calendars are setup in Windows Calendar, users will need to choose the calendar a event belongs to. An event cannot belong to multiple calendars.
• URL -- Lets the user specify a URL to a website on the Internet related to the event.
• Start and End Date -- Specify the date and time the event will take place on.
• Notes -- Free form text field the user can enter in additional details.

Events in Windows Calendar are called appointments.

Appointments can be setup to repeat on a daily, weekly, monthly, or even yearly basis. Advanced options let users configure extra settings for the reoccurrence of appointments such as an “end” date they would like Windows Calendar to stop the repeating it.

Reminders can be setup to alert the user via a popup box of upcoming events. These popup boxes look and act very similar to those available in Outlook in Microsoft Office.

A popup window reminds users of appointments they have setup in Windows Calendar

Users can invite others to their appointments by either manually entering an e-mail address or clicking the “Attendees” button which opens a dialog listing their contacts from Windows Contacts. Strangely, attempting to drag a contact directly from the Windows Contacts window was unsuccessful and caused Windows Calendar to display a warning message about importing the wrong type of calendar file.

Clicking Invite will compose a new e-mail message to the specified attendees and attach the appointment to add to their calendars. Users are free to edit the contents of the invitation before they send it. To add an appointment received, double-click on its attachment and Windows Calendar will launch and ask which calendar (if more than one exists) to add the appointment to.

To-Do's
To-do's are different from appointments as they are tasks the user must complete. To-do's can be created by right-clicking in the tasks box and choosing “New Task“ from the popup menu or by clicking the New Task button in the command bar.

To sort tasks, users will have to right-click in tasks box to find sorting options. To-Dos can be sorted by calendar, title, priority, or due date. Just as with appointments, to-dos can store additional details.

• Completed -- The current status of the to-do
• Priority level -- Low, Medium, High.
• Start -- When work on the task has been started.
• Due Date -- If the task is supposed to completed by a specific date, users can enter it here.
• Calendar -- If multiple calendars are setup in iCal, users will need to choose the calendar a to-do belongs to. An to-do cannot belong to multiple calendars.
• URL -- Lets the user specify a URL to a website on the Internet related to the to-do.
• Reminder -- Displays a pop up dialog alerting the user of the task's due date. There's only one option...“on date“. There doesn't appear to be a way to have it alert the user a day before.
• Notes -- Free form text field the user can enter in additional details.

New in iCal is that system-wide link of Calender's, To-Do's and more. For example in Mail one can open the Reminder's category and check the same To-Do's in there aswell.

A popup window reminds users of appointments they have setup in Windows Calendar

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