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You've seen iCal in your Applications folder, but have you ever really used it? Still wondering how to use iSync or Address Book? Justin Williams will show you how to use your Mac to get your life in order.

Have you ever had one of those days when you knew you had somewhere to be, but couldn't remember where. A few hours later, you get a call from your girlfriend. Yeah, you forgot to pick her up to meet her parents for dinner. You are now in the dog house, my friend. The truth is that we all have busy lives with work, school and social activities. Everyone has had that day where you were shuffled from meeting to meeting and you could barely remember what your name was after it was all over.

Introduction

With Mac OS X, Apple gave us the tools we need to keep ourselves more organized. They realized that Macintosh users wanted to keep themselves organized. They wanted to have their calendars and contacts on their computers so they could easily reference them. The days of date books and pen and paper are long behind us. We now carry around PDAs, cell phones and iPods. Wouldn't it be great to keep all of our information on those devices? That is what I am going to show you how to do. We will cover setting up your digital secretary using Apple's iCal and Address Book, sending the data to all your digital devices and keeping everything synchronized using Apple's iSync.

Requirements

We are going to assume you are using at least Mac OS X 10.2 Jaguar. While Address Book has been a mainstay since the original OS X release, iCal and iSync were released exclusively for Jaguar. This tutorial also covers the latest versions of each piece of software (as of this writing): iCal 1.5.1 and iSync 1.3. You can easily grab the latest versions of each from Apple's Web site.

Download the latest iCal

Download the latest iSync

iCal

As you can see above, iCal has a clean, simple interface when you first start it up. Don't let this view deceive you, however. There are far more options to configure in iCal.

The figure above shows you what I am talking about. To begin with, we should discuss all the components of the iCal interface. The top left corner is a calendar listing. iCal lets you create separate calendars for different types of appointments. The defaults are Work and Home. If you want to add a new calendar, you just click the plus sign in the lower left corner. I try to keep everything organized and categorized, so I have separate calendars for Work, School, Personal and Projects (like MacZealots stuff!). If you are a subscriber to .Mac, you can easily publish your calendars on the World Wide Web for your friends, family and co-workers to see. Simply select the calendar you want, and then Calendar -> Publish.

Aside from publishing your personal calendars to .Mac, anyone can subscribe to their friend's published calendars or a wide variety of calendars provided by Apple and others on the internet. Listed below are a few resources you may find useful.

• iCalShare.com - iCalShare is your one-stop shop for all types of calendars ranging from sports schedules and tv guides to MUG Meeting Guides. My favorite calendar on iCalShare is of course the 24 Episode Listing. :)
• Apple's iCal Listing - These calendars are provided by Apple. Apple isn't as quick to update these as the people at iCalShare (It took a few weeks to get updated NFL schedules for example), but they have a nice selection that you may be intersted in looking into.

To manually add a calendar, you simply click the Subscribe icon in the Calendar menu. You need to have the webcal:// address of the calendar. Let's say that your friend publishes his class schedule so you can keep tabs on him throughout the day. Simple have him send you a publish e-mail, and you will have the address to his Calendar.

iCal also provides a Monthly Calendar view which is useful if you want to quickly reference what day of the week a certain date is. This is also a quick way to browse through your calendar and add items to dates in the future. You can show up to three months at a time in the Monthl calendar. Simply resize the horizontal bar above the calendar to the size you desire.

The main part of the interface is your calendar view. You can set whether you want this to be a daily view, weekly view or monthly view via the three buttons on the bottom of the iCal window. The three-button interface is similar to iPhotos Import, Organize, Edit, Share buttons. To add a new appointment to your calendar, just double-click the date and time frame where you want the event. You can then resize the event to be as long as you want. We will cover the more advanced options of appointments in a bit.

Below the main window is a search results window. This allows you to quickly find an appointment in the future. I tend to use this so I can see the next time I need to go to the dentist or eye doctor. It makes it a lot easier to find an appointments than jumping from month to month browsing calendars. Live searching is also a main stay in iTunes and Mac OS X 10.3's Finder. When you single click on a search result, iCal will send you to that date in your calendar allowing you to edit its details and view what else is surrounding the event.

Another feature that is often overlooked in iCal is its ToDo List. This list is able to be synchronized with your Palm, which is a very useful feature. Simple double-click the To Do Items view and name your event. You can set the tasks to be for certain calendars, to have a certain due date and an associated url to go with it.

The last part of the iCal interface is also the most complex and useful. The Details drawer is where you can set all the options in iCal. Whether its a calendar, appointment or to-do task, there are many details you can set for each. Calendars allow you to give a description of each type of calendar that will help define it even more. If you have published your calendar to .Mac there will also be options about how often to auto-publish the calendar, and whether or not to publish the alarms and tasks. Each appointment lets you set a location, specify whether it is an all day event, and choose the time frame of the event. New to iCal 1.5 is the ability to have an all day event span across multiple days. This is a welcomed feature because I can now easily set my breaks from class and work without having to set a separate event for each day. You can also set a time zone if an event is in a different time zone than the one you are in. I am using this to set the event times for when I head out to San Francisco for Macworld in January.

The Attendees field lets you add other users to an event. It pulls the information from your Address Book, so you can easily send an invitation to the event to the person. To do this, simply click on attendees field, and select Send Invitations. It will automatically send an invite to the user via e-mail.

You can set the status of an event, so you can be reminded if it's a tentative, confirmed or cancelled appointment. This is far more useful in the business world than for your personal calendar. Below that is a feature I am a big fan of. I am able to set the repeat rate of an event. I use this to set my class schedule for school as well as birthdays. I haven't missed a friend's birthday for the past two years thanks to this. This keeps me in good standing with my friends. Alarms allow you to set a reminder for an event. These alarms can be transferred to your iPod, PDA and cell phone as well. You can set it to be a pop up message, an e-mail, or to actually open a file. Let's say you need to print out a report for work or school, you can have iCal open the file at a specific time in your day to remind you to get the job done. Finally, you can set the URL for a Web site the event pertains to as well as notes to give you a brief summary of the appointment's purpose.

If iCal seems like it is exactly what you need, Apple has made it very easy to import your Entourage calendar data into iCal. Simply select Import under the File Menu and select Entourage Data. It will launch Entourage, pull the data and put it in a calendar appropriately named Entourage.

Address Book

The second part to our equation is Address Book. With Jaguar, Apple gave this app a complete makeover. They made it so that any developer could access it via simple APIs. What this allows is a central database for all your contacts. No longer will you have to deal with having to maintain four applications, each with different sets of contact information: that is, if the developer will use the Address Book API's.

The Address Book interface is a lot simpler than iCal. It has a simple three-column interface that is similar to the Finder's column view. The first column allows you to group contacts into various groups. Think of it like a playlist in iTunes or a Photo Album in iPhoto. I tend to use this to make a group of contacts I want to sync with my cell phone. It helps prevent users without phone numbers from invading my phone book. The directories group is where you access LDAP servers. LDAP stands for Lightweight Directory Access Protocol and is a way to set up a central contact database. Companies and universities use this so that everyone has access to one set of contacts apart from their personal ones. At Purdue, the LDAP server allows us to easily get the e-mail addresses of other students. This is really useful if you have to get in contact with someone in your class, and you only know their name.

The second pane is where your contacts are displayed. To add a new contact, you simply select the plus sign below the column and it will open up a new entry field in the third pane. It doens't take a rocket science degree to know how to fill this out. Any data you don't fill out won't show up when you view the cards. If you want to edit a card after its initial setup, simply click Edit, do your work, and click Edit again to save the changes.

A neat feature with Address Book is the ability to set a picture with each contact. When you receive e-mail from that person, you will see that image in the message window which will give you an instant visual cue as to who the message is from. If a user is a subscriber to the .Mac service and has set a picture via .Mac Webmail, Address Book is smart enough to download that image from the server. It's the little things like this that make using a Macintosh a pleasure.

If you have bluetooth on your Mac and a bluetooth enabled phone such as Nokia's 3650, you will see the bluetooth icon next to the view buttons. Click this and it will establish a connection between your phone and your Mac. With this connection enabled, you will be able to send SMS messages (text messaging) via Address Book, dial your phone and receive notifications of incoming calls on your Mac desktop. Being able to type SMS from my G5 has made it a lot easier to send a quick message to a friend or family member without having to type it out on the phone's keypad.

The notifications that pop up on your screen will allow you to answer a call, forward it to voice mail, log that you received the call or send an SMS reply. If you miss a phone call, the window will stay active so that you can easily reference who called. The only downfall to the implementation of this technology is that the connection quits after 10 minutes, so you constantly have to reconnect it. I was hoping this issue would have been fixed in Panther, but unfortunately it hasn't. Until it is fixed, the usefulness of this can't be fully achieved.

If your company or university has an LDAP server, you can easily configure it view the Address Book preferences. Simple look for their documentation or ask your system administrator if they have an LDAP server setup. They will be able to give you the values to fill in for it to work.

Once you have LDAP configured, you can search for users via Address Book, or just type in their name in Mail.app and the LDAP server will be searched automatically.

In the Address Book Preferences, you can also edit the default template for a new Address Book entry. As you can see to the right, you can add several different types of fields depending on your needs. Address Book also lets you format the way a phone number is displayed.

A new feature in Panther is the ability to synchronize your Address Book in an Exchange Environment. As long as your host is running at least Exchange 2000, you can set this up under the General Pane. Simply select "Synchronize With Exchange" and then supply your username, password, and Outlook Web Access server. If you don't know the Web Access server, contact your administrator, and he will gladly tell you.

Like with iCal, if you have data in another application such as Entourage, Apple has provided convenient Applescripts to allow you to transfer your contact information into Address Book. Select the Applescript menu from the menu bar and select Import Addresses. A dialog will pop up asking you to select what application you will be importing data from: Entourage, Outlook Express, Palm Desktop, Eudora, Claris Emailer or Netscape.

You can also import vCards into Address Book by dragging them into the Address Book window. It doesn't get much simpler than that.

If you are a .Mac subscriber, your contacts will be synchronized which allows you to access them via .Mac's Webmail interface. This is a very handy feature for when you are on the road and need to e-mail one of your contacts. No longer will you have to look up their e-mail address on a PDA or Web site.

iSync

iSync is the glue that puts everything together. iSync was released alongside iCal at Macworld New York 2002 and was touted as the easiest way to keep all your important data uniform among all your digital devices.

The interface has a button for each digital device you have: .Mac, iPod, cell phone and PDA. Clicking each icon will bring up the configuration panel for each device. To add a new device, simply hit Command-N on your keyboard. iSync will scan your system to detect the new device.

Now that we have covered the big three applications we are going to be dealing with, let's get everything set up.

Setup

It should go without saying that the first thing you should do is import or add your data to the Address Book and iCal. With your data in place, we will move to iSync to get everything ready to be synchronized.

.Mac

If you are a subscribe to .Mac, you can have not only your Address Book and iCal data synchronized between your Macs, but also your Safari bookmarks. To configure your .Mac settings, first make sure you have set up your username and password in the OS X System Preferences.

With that configured, we can jump back to iSync and select the .Mac globe. In here we select Turn On .Mac Synchronization. You will be asked to name your Computer, so select a unique name that you can use to identify it: iBook, G5, etc. Select the checkboxes for Synchronizing Safari bookmarks, Address Book contacts, iCal calendar and to-do items. Also, be sure to check Synchronize every hour.

With this enabled, your data will be synchronized in the background without any need for your intervention. This is especially useful if you have a Mac at home and work. Anytime you change data on your home computer, by the time you get to work it should automatically show up there as well.

You will need to go through all of your Macs and do this step to ensure they are all sharing the same data.

iPod

To add a device such as the iPod to your synchronization schedule, simple make sure the iPod is plugged in and from iSync's menu bar select Devices -> Add New Devices. A dialog will pop up asking you to select a device. Your iPod should show up in the list. Simply double-click it, and it will be added to iSync. Configure its options in a similar manner as the .Mac configuration. You can set your iPod to synchronize your Contacts and Calendars.

If you have a 3rd generation iPod (With the red highlighted buttons), you can also configure your iPod to use Notes. Notes is basically a quick and dirty way to keep tasks, small bits of information, etc. To enable notes make sure your iPod is set up as a Firewire Disk in iTunes. Simply click on the iPod icon in the Source area of iTunes and then on the iPod button in the lower right hand corner. . From the dialog that pops up, select Enable Firewire Disk Use.

Be warned that the only drawback to this is that you will have to unmount your iPod whenever you want to take it with you now. Unmounting is the same as with a CD. Simply drag the iPod icon on your desktop to the trash, or select the Eject button in the Finder.

To put a note on your iPod simply follow this PDF guide for how to write notes provided by Apple. Basically you have to use basic HTML tags to display the text. Each note is limited to 4KB. Anything beyond that 4KB limit is truncated. When you have your note finished, simply drag it onto the iPod and into the Notes folder. It will now show up in the Extras -> Notes folder of your iPod.

Cell Phone

Assuming you have a phone on the supported device list, you can have it synchronize with iSync as well. We will go through the set upusing a Nokia 3650. First you want to make sure you have the phone paired with your Macintosh. Pairing is basically establishing a one-to-one connection between your Mac and the phone so you can send data between. To pair a new device, open up System Preferences and select Bluetooth. Select Pair New Device. A set upwizard will popup and walk you through the process of configuring the phone.

Now that we have the phone paired, we can add it to iSync. Again, select Devices -> Add New Device and double-click on your phone. Again, select what options you want to synchronize with your phone. The 3650 supports both Calendar and Address Book syncing.

A tip I will offer is to create a group in your Address Book with the contacts you want to display on your phone. With the introduction of iSync 1.3, Apple took away the option to only transfer contacts with a phone number to a cell phone. Because of this, you will end up with a lot of contacts without numbers on your phone.

To set upa group, launch Address Book. From the File Menu select New Group. Give it a name. I chose Phone Contacts. Now you can easily drag the contacts you want on your phone to this group just like you would a song to an iTunes playlist.

Back in iSync you should select Synchronize your distribution group (Phone Contacts for example).

You can also tell iSync not to synchronize any data past a certain time period. This is basically to save space on your cell phone. Since it doesn't have nearly as much space as a normal computer, having past data can be a waste of space. You can have a time period of one day up to one month.

PDA

If you have a PDA such as the Palm Zire or Palm Tungsten T3, you can have iSync synchronize its data with this device as well. The set upfor this is a bit more complex than the previous devices, so let's take it slow.

First you will need to make sure you have Palm Desktop installed. You can grab this from Apple. Assuming you haven't already installed this, you will have to set upa user for your PDA to recognize (usually just your first name).

With Palm Desktop installed, you will need to download the iSync Palm Conduit. What this does is allow iSync to override Palm Desktop when it comes to what data to synchronize. Install the iSync Conduit. Once that is installed, we are going to have to tell Palm Desktop that we want iSync to take over the synchronization settings.

First, open HotSync Manager (by default, it's located in the Palm folder inside your Applications folder). The HotSync manager is the application that takes care of sending data between your PDA and your Mac. In the HotSync manager, select HotSync -> Conduit Settings. In the Conduit Settings window, double-click the iSync Conduit, then select "Enable iSync for this Palm device." This allows the Address Book, Date Book and To Do information on your Palm OS device to be synchronized with your Mac OS X Address Book and iCal using iSync. (Notes on your Palm will continue to sync with the Palm Desktop). Click OK.

Now that we have that all configured, jump back into iSync and Add a new device. Your PDA should pop up now. Add it to iSync.

So, what next? If you have set up a PDA, click your PDA's hotsync button. This will launch iSync and begin the synchronization process. If you don't have a PDA, click the Sync Now button in iSync.

While the data is syncing you may receive a warning box saying that a high percentage of your data is changing. Simply select OK. It is basically a safeguard to make sure that you realize all that data is being shifted around. If you want to disable this, go into your iSync preferences and uncheck Show Data Change Alert...

Conclusion

Today, we have set up your Mac to synchronize all your personal data among three different devices and multiple Macintoshes. I hope you have realized just how much functionality Apple provides to you out of the box for no extra cost. You have full-fledged calendaring, contact and synchronization applications with so much functionality, that Windows users will be drooling for years to come.

Justin Williams is founder and chief author for MacZealots. He switched to the Mac almost five years ago hasn't looked back since. When not blogging or coding, you can find him watching copious amounts of TV. Justin can be reached at

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