QuickCal Widget

This Mac OS 10.5 widget takes natural language expressions describing calendar events and tasks, and creates them for you - instantly - without you needing to have iCal open!

Download Now! quickcal-1.1.zip

Beer Fund

Care to say thanks and send over a buck or two? Karma will be on your side.


Release Notes

1.1 (October 11, 2008)

  • Look and feel improvements
  • Help system implemented
  • Bugfix: won’t allow the creation of events in read-only calendars (Thanks, Colin!)
  • Bugfix: the new-version check was broken! so many people running 1.0 or older who aren’t being pushed to the new version :(

1.0 (July 24, 2008)

  • Bright pink color scheme is gone, moved to something a bit more subdued
  • Current calendar now displayed on front of widget, can click on this to advance through available calendars (or shift-click to move backwards through the list)
  • Can turn off auto-update-checks with a setting on the back of the widget (check frequency is at startup, then once every 48 hours)
  • A few bugfixes

0.90 (June 24, 2008)

  • Live Preview! Now, instead of having to hit submit and quickly check to see if your text was parsed correctly, you’ll see the details of the parsing as you type! Hit enter when you want to create your event/todo
  • Auto-update check - the widget will check for updates once every 2 days
  • MANY small bugfixes

Screencast Demo

Sorry it’s not very legible! but it should convey the general concept of this app… This is also a VERY old version, I need to update this.

Example Usage

  • Dinner tomorrow at 6:00pm until 9pm
  • Meet with Roger next Wednesday at 3:30 pm
  • Jogging today at 6pm for 30 minutes
  • Dad’s birthday on saturday
  • Yoga class on 4/5 at noon
  • todo - Clean golf clubs
  • File taxes before 4/15/2008!!!
  • Write novel –todo
  • Fireworks on July 4th

Not Supported (now)

  • Recurring events (do something every tuesday from X to Y)
  • Ability to disambiguate times (when I say ‘dinner at 4′, know for me that means 4pm, but for someone else, it might mean 4am)
  • Parsing out event location from the string to put into location of iCal event
  • Support for invite lists (’Do something with Tom Jones next thursday at 10:45 a.m.’) - should find Tom Jones in your Address book and add him as an attendee
  • Support for non-English localizations/I18N. (This only knows am/pm with times, and only knows dates as month/day/year

Hints

  • To create tasks, just start or end with “todo”. To assign importance to a task, throw some !’s at the end of it. The number of bangs dictates importance
  • To create a task with a specific due date, just use “task by DATE”, or “task before DATE”, or “task due on DATE”, …
  • Always start the event with the description, and then get into days and times (”Do Something on DAY between X and Y”)
  • If you specify a start time without an end time, the assumption is made that you want an event for 60 minutes. (This will be configurable in an upcoming version) - “Meet w/ Tom tomorrow at 5pm”
  • The events will by default be created in your first Calendar in iCal. If you flip the widget over, you can change this.
  • Smart Reminders will automatically create reminders for you, and sometimes it will create more than one - based on how far in the future your event you’re creating is. Fully configurable on the back-side of the widget.

Download

quickcal-1.1.zip

Contact

Comments, suggestions, issues, feature requests - all greatly appreciated! Send an email to boutcher - at - gmail -dot- com .