Sunday, January 08, 2006

iCal Exchange

Those of you who use OS X's iCal application or any of Mozilla's calendar applications (which are available on Windows) may be familiar with sites like iCalShare which keep a catalog of useful calendars to which you can subscribe. For example, let's say you want to keep track of all of the US holidays. Let's say you also want to keep track of each day Lost is on (including a description of each episode). Well, you can go into iCal (or a Mozilla calendar app) and subscribe to an iCalShare calendar that does exactly that.

Well, ideally you could also publish your own personal calendar somewhere. That way other people (perhaps only people you give a password to) can subscribe to your calendar (and you can subscribe to theirs). That way it's easy to keep track of when someone else is available.

Well, iCal Exchange does exactly that. You get a free account (all you need to submit is e-mail address, user name, and password) and you can publish your calendars to it into either a public area or a private area. People can then subscribe to your public or private calendars. Private calendars will require a password for subscription.

They've also started working on a "Showcase" feature where you can put some of your calendars in a "showcase." That will allow other people to find it and subscribe to it (so these are obviously public calendars that probably aren't very personal; calendars that show events happening at your university, for example). It looks like that feature is underdeveloped at the moment though.

So that's fun. That way if you want to do iCal publishing, you don't need a .Mac account nor do you need your own webserver. Just use iCal Exchange.

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