Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

Adding Time Zone Support
iCal has a nice time zone support feature that is not activated by default, but if you often travel
or deal with people in other time zones, then this is fantastic feature to use. Activating time zone
support is as easy as selecting the “Turn on time zone support” option on the Advanced tab in
iCal’s preferences. Once the support is turned on, you will notice that a small time zone dropdown
list will appear in the upper-right of iCal’s main window above the search field. You can
alter this field to reflect the time zone that iCal is in. Additionally, events will gain a time zone
setting. With time zone support enabled, iCal will automatically alter event times based on the
time zone of the event and the time zone of iCal.
Subscribing to Other Calendars
Sometimes you may want to subscribe to a calendar other than your own. For example, you may
want to subscribe to a calendar that provides the schedule of your favorite baseball team’s
games, or you may want to subscribe to a calendar that contains all the common U.K. holidays.
Often, organizations will post calendar links on their web sites where you can just click a
link and iCal will automatically open and add the calendar. Other times you may need to use the
Calendar ➤ Subscribe (Opt+Cmd+S) menu bar option that will open the dialog box and allow
you to enter the URL in the calendar file.
To get started, select the Calendar ➤ Find Shared Calendars option from the menu bar. This
will open your web browser to an Apple web site were Apple makes available a number of common
shared calendars (including MLB baseball schedules and U.K. holidays).
Sharing Your Calendars
Besides subscribing to other calendars, sometimes you may want to share one of your calendars.
To enable other people to subscribe to your calendar, you must have access to .Mac or a Web-
DAV server to publish your calendar. If you have access, then you select a calendar and select
Calendar ➤ Publish from the menu bar. This will open a sheet asking for information about
where and what you want to share. Once the calendar is shared, you can pass the URL to anyone
who you want to view it.
Learning About iCal and CalDAV
CHAPTER 11 MAIL, ADDRESS BOOK, AND iCAL 227
There are lots of issues with sharing calendars, as outlined previously, but the biggest one is that
it’s a little too static; in other words, calendar information doesn’t freely flow back and forth.
Many calendaring systems avoid these issues, but most of them are fairly proprietary systems, so
there are interoperability problems. To solve this, Apple and a number of other organizations
have joined together to create the CalDAV standard, which provides a standard way to handle
calendaring systems in a client/server environment.
In this system, calendars are stored on a central calendar server that makes everyone’s schedules
available to everyone else (with the security frameworks in place at the organization). The
big advantage to this is that it facilitates scheduling and even planning in a much more effective
manner.
It just so happens that iCal in Leopard supports CalDAV (and Leopard Server provides a
nice CalDAV-based calendar server called iCal Server). If you have access to a CalDAV server,
you need to set up the account information on the Accounts tab in iCal’s preferences. This will
add a calendar to iCal representing the calendar on the server.