It frustrates me that so many different services have a calendar function, and yet it's still a pain in the ass to make sure that my personal calendar is up to date. More often than not I find myself manually creating events using copy-and-paste, instead of the event being automatically created for me by whatever service I'm using.

If you happen to be a Facebook Events user, a utility called EventSync can help you keep your iCal calendar application on your Mac up to date with your Facebook events. It's smart enough to allow you to choose to sync all events, or only those that you have accepted (amongst other options). Development is active on the utility too, and Hawk Wings reports that version 2.0 will include the ability to display the flyers and images associated with the Facebook events.

EventSync is donationware for the Mac platform.

BusyCal is a calendar app for OS X, and its developers would like you to think of it as "iCal Pro." It's designed for families and small groups, and includes a handful of syncing features that make collaborating on a calendar a lot easier. BusyCal syncs to Google Calendar, and it syncs to multiple machines over a Bonjour network, which is ideal for a multi-user home or an office.

Design-wise, it's like iCal with a lot of nice usability improvements. It's close enough in terms of layout and features that iCal users shouldn't have any trouble switching, and it imports your iCal calendars automatically when you start it up for the first time. Among many, many other features, BusyCal also does iPhone syncing, multi-user editing, and a customizable list view. If you're already an iCal or Google Calendar user, it's well worth giving BusyCal a shot.

Dateline is a slick little Mac app that adds a clean little one-line calendar to your desktop. You can adjust the width of the calendar, and change the window level so it's floating on top of your windows or flush with the desktop. Double-clicking on a date will open that date in iCal, so Dateline's minimal featureset isn't a liability at all.

A couple of tricks you should know about using Dateline: first, you can hide the dock icon using a checkbox in preferences. Second, without that dock icon, the fastest way to open Dateline preferences if you need to change something is by control-clicking the calendar strip. If you're having trouble doing this, switch the display level of Dateline to "desktop icons" instead of "desktop." Dateline is nothing revolutionary, but I often find myself opening Google Calendar in my browser just to see what day of the week some upcoming appointment falls on, and Dateline saves me the trouble.

[via Daring Fireball]

I'm quite the fan of BusyMac Software's very excellent BusySync application for Mac OS X. It's always been a great (and ridiculously easily ) way to share calendars over your local network using the Mac's built-in zero-config Bonjour technology.

Today at Macworld Expo, the company has announced that an all-new application, BusyCal, is coming later in the year. The application, which is marketed as iCal Pro, promises 'the beauty and simplicity of iCal with the power of BusySync's ... calendar sharing and syncing technology'.

On top of all the regular calendaring that you'd expect, the application will ship with:

• Bonjour, iPhone & Google Syncing
• Multi-user editing
• Calendar permissions and security
• Offline editing
• Graphics, icons, themes and sticky notes
• Weather
• Rich text

The application, when it ships, will require Mac OS X Leopard and cost $40 per computer. If you already own BusySync, or purchase it before BusyCal ships ($25), you can upgrade to BusyCal for $10.

Deadline is a really great web-based alternative to the standard desktop to-do apps. There are several ways to interact with it and access your to-do list, including via Jabber/Google Talk, through Atom, RSS and iCal feeds, and email. Deadline understands input in natural language, so you can write something like, "call mom on Tuesday," and the web app will schedule it appropriately.

The Deadline UI is well-designed and not distracting, with edit and delete buttons readily accessible next to each item. Inspired by Twitter, to-do items have a 140 character cap to accomodate SMS support (which is forthcoming for Deadline, but not quite there yet). The 140 limitation doesn't have much practical effect, because date, time and location information can be submitted through brief natural language, no fancy syntax involved. There's an XML API, too, if you want to experiment with Deadline yourself.

Yahoo! is rolling out the first major overhaul of its web-based calendar application in 10 years. But while there are 278-million Yahoo! Mail users, only about 8 million people use the calendar.

The new Yahoo! Calendar beta looks pretty nice. It has a slick interface that lets you zoom in on any particular date for a close-up even when you're using the month view. The calendar also features Flickr integration, so that random Creative Commons-licensed images can be pulled in to make the calendar look pretty. Eventually users will be able to add images from their own Flickr accounts.

The updates aren't just cosmetic. You can manage multiple calendars, share calendars with friends, and create to-do lists associated with your calendar. The new calendar also supports iCal and CalDAV protocols, which mean you can import calendars from AOL, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google. At least in theory. I tried importing my Google Calendar with no success. But I was able to import my Yahoo! Calendar into Google, so that's something at least.

Keep in mind, the new Yahoo! Calendar is still in beta. And it shows in a couple of places. There are a bunch of features available in the old Yahoo! Calendar that are absent from the new beta, including the ability to search for events, show sports, ifnacnce, holiday, and weather information, or even add symbols for event types like birthdays and anniversaries. You should also note that if you switch to the beta version of the calendar and then decide to switch back, you will lose any changes made in the beta version.

Long story short, the new Yahoo! Calendar is worth checking out. But you might not want to make the switch just yet. The beta is only available to users in the US, UK, India, Taiwan, and Brazil and the moment, with a worldwide rollout expected within the next few months.

Welcome to Googleholic, your weekly fix of everything Google.

In this, yes, we're alive edition:

• Google tests automatic Blogger support for Google Reader
• Gmail adds "never send it to Spam" filter
• CalDAV support comes to Google Calendar
• Multilingual Google
• Google Maps transit directions come to more phones

Ever notice that there's a missing feature on Facebook? Ok, it's not the ability to be able to add 5.001 friends. Get over it, nobody can have that many friends.

The real feature that's missing is an event calendar! Sure, we know whose birthday it is every day when we log in, and sure we know when the next event is because we get 83 emails reminding us, but where's the event calendar???

Well, fbCal solves that all. With a simple install of the Facebook app, it creates feeds that you can pull into iCal, Google Calendar, Sunbird or Outlook. In TWO separate feeds, too. One for birthdays and one for events. External access to events is something a lot of people have been waiting for.

Never again can you forget to get your best friend a birthday icon from the Facebook store for her 35th birthday that she's really upset about and wants to spend it alone on Facebook the whole night. Don't ask.

You can either download a file and import, or subscribe to the feed and it will sync like the wind. Like a very fast technological wind. Whatever that means.

This was built by a gent named Robert M. Baldwin, and we salute you!

[via the inquisitr]

iCal is a great calendaring app, but if you're a heavy user, you'll sympathize with us when we say it drives us nuts. Really, the most troublesome part of using iCal is adding events. Lots of unnecessary clicks and options that you can hide and show combine to slow you down when you're creating an event. Something that should take ten seconds takes forty.

So we went in search of something to speed the process up--and we found it. Do-It is an Automator app that has a single screen for entering iCal events, and it is much faster that iCal itself. Almost every option is there, though recurring events aren't implemented. Do-It is definitely going in our dock.

The one thing that drives us nuts about Apple's iCal calendaring software is its reminder system. After several revisions, iCal's reminder selections are still gumpy and time-consuming, and it's still not possible to set a default reminder timeframe, so you have to add three or four mouse clicks to every event in order to set up a reminder, each and every time. Getting timely reminders from iCal is therefore a pain, as programming the alerts takes more work than ought to be necessary.

Fortunately, there's an easier way to display scheduled events than simply using reminders. iCalViewer is an application that can be used as a screensaver, showing your entire schedule in a colorful view whenever your Mac's saver kicks on. You can also park the view under the Finder, on the desktop. For those of us who require a lot of nagging, this isn't just handy--it's indispensable.

Most blogging tools and web-based dashboards don't offer much in the way of graphically viewing your post schedule. You typically get a list of your posts that you can search and order by date, but that's about it. If you're blogging on WordPress and would like a more graphical view of your posts that should play well with just about any calendar app you're using, this iCal-Posts plug-in by Gary King might be just the thing you're looking for. Offering a zero-config setup, you simply upload King's plug-in to your WordPress plug-in directory and activate, then add '?ical' to the end of your URL (i.e. - downloadsquad.com/?ical). In our tests, this causes most browsers to download a .ICS file which was immediately opened by iCal on Mac OS X. Adding the URL to web calendars like Google Calendar also worked perfectly. If you would prefer to follow only a specific category in your calendar, you can tweak the URL by adding '&category=' (i.e. - downloadsquad.com/?ical&category=blogging).

Gary King provides his iCal-Posts plug-in for free from his site.

For about a month now, the kind folks at Plaxo have allowed us to play with the beta of Plaxo 3.0, a major update to their unique service that takes the 'management' out of desktop + online PIM. As if the present version's ability to synchronize your contact and calendar information between Mac OS X, Windows, Linux and some online services wasn't enough, Plaxo's ability to automatically update your address book whenever a fellow Plaxo user changes their information was a pretty unique feature that really let the company's vision shine. After playing with this new beta, however, we feel comfortable saying that Plaxo 3.0 could very well be nothing short of revolutionary to world of data management and synchronization.

While the Plaxo folk understandably won't allow us to spill too many details, we can at least give you a general overview of what all the fuss is about. The most significant change in this upcoming version is the addition of some major new 'sync points,' which are applications and web services Plaxo can synchronize with, impressively spanning the entire digital globe of OSes and web brands. In our screenshot above you see five points: Plaxo (of course), Google (yep: Gmail and, soon to come, Calendar), Windows Mail in Vista, Mac OS X's Address Book and iCal and even Yahoo!'s Address Book and (soon to come) calendar. Another major new sync point (requiring a paid Plaxo account) is LInkedIn, allowing users access the increasingly popular social network based on who has worked with who. Never before have we seen so much synchronizing power built in such a smart and streamlined tool. Amazingly, a lot of this new functionality will still apparently be provided for free, with a few select sync points and the rest of Plaxo's services (such as e-cards, Address Book recovery, storing more than 1000 contacts and 24-7 support) being made available to paid accounts.

Other new features in the Plaxo 3.0 beta reveal a new 'dashboard for your life' aspect to the service, which is also pulled off pretty well. Some of the online tools allow you to view basic things like the week's weather, while others allow you to easily watch RSS feeds for Flickr photos, friends' Amazon wishlists and blogs.

That's about all we should talk about for now, however, but stay tuned for a full review and screenshot gallery as soon as we can schmooze the Plaxo guys into greenlighting them. In the meantime, if you're already a current Plaxo user or we have just piqued your interest, we recommend cleaning up your address book and finally getting into the habit of actually jotting down your week's appointments and todos in Outlook, iCal, Google Calendar or any of the other services Plaxo will help you synchronize. This way, if you do it once, the new Plaxo should ensure you might never have to again.

Feel like partying in the DC area tonight, but don't know what's going on? dclicio.us is going to help.

dclicio.us is built with the lovely Ruby on Rails and aggregates events for the Washington DC area. Users sign up for a free account and add their favorite artists, or import them from iTunes, so they can be monitored and notified of the events arrival in the city. dclicio.us Show aggregation shows a listing of events in the DC area, where users can click off and bookmark shows of interest that get added to a special My Shows category. Events can then be read through an RSS feed, and imported and updated through iCal or Google Calendar.

This type of site has a lot of potential for other markets as well, but no word as of yet if dclicio.us plans to expand beyond the beltway.

[via Web2.0Show]

Spanning Sync will make your Google Calendars and Apple iCal play nicely together with devices.

iCal and Google Calendars are great applications for different sets of reasons, one is online with sharing capabilities, one is desktop driven with great notifications and offline capabilities. Get ready to get excited Mac users, Spanning Sync syncs all of these features together and lets Mac users choose which calendar application you want to work in with total two way calendar synchronization.

If you find yourself working on different Macs, or require a calendar that is shared throughout the day, Spanning Sync ties in support for multiple Macs and sharing capabilities. Simply share a Google Calendar, and Spanning Sync will sync them all together. Changes made in iCal, will appear on the Google Calendar, and changes that are made to Google Calendar will be made on the iCal calendars. Apple's iSync then works to sync up calendars onto capable devices like mobile phones and iPods as well.

There is a 15 day trial period for Spanning Sync, with a one year subscription costing $25, or you can drop $65 to purchase the app outright.