Andrew’s Mac Tips Weblog

Go to Today in iCal and create a new event. Give it a name like “iCal Quick Alarm.” Bring up the Info window and set the alarm for that event to “Alarm with Sound 0 Minutes Before.”

Now de-select the event and then drag it to your task list (this will make a copy of the event that is now a task). Here’s the trick: You now have a template for any number of alarms that will sound at the exact time on which they are dropped, rather than having to fuss with the configuration each time.

Now, if you need an alarm to sound at precisely 8:23 just drag the iCal Quick Alarm task onto Today at 8:15 or 8:30 (this turns a copy of the task into an event), click on the minutes in the info window and roll your mouse wheel to fine-tune — and you’re done.

When the alarm sounds you can drag it to snooze it, or simply throw it away! Next time you need one it’s right there in your task list as a template.

After years and years, I finally have iCal running on my Mac. I’m not the brightest person in the world, so it took me that long to discover that the culprit was SIMBL (a framework that allows various third party tweaks to enhance your system). I’d read on various forums how iCal might crash on launching because a certain font wasn’t installed, or because of the presence of various other app enhancers, and I’d eliminated those options as being the cause. Then, recently I’ve been playing with iGTD. It can talk to iCal and I wanted to test that feature so I trolled the forums again and SIMBL popped up.

One problem solved by killing SIMBL. But SIMBL supported two utilities that I really enjoy; one is FullScreen and the other is PithHelmet.

I can live without FullScreen, but I am really used to PithHelmet, which sits inside Safari and very effectively kills most ads. So, I did a search for other ad killers and found a remarkably simple solution. At floppymoose.com there’s a ready-made CSS file that you can download and have Safari use it as a first reference when rendering web pages — effectively looking for the telltale signs of ads and then removing them. The resulting pages are not as well filtered as the were using PithHelmet, but they are certainly much more acceptable than no filtering at all.

iCal is pretty neat. There are only a couple of interface features that I wish it had: One would be a line crossing Today’s view that indicated the current time, as seen in the Google calendar. The other would be some kind of arrow to indicate that there are more appointments that are currently off the screen. As it is I have to show the whole 24 hours onscreen which is a pretty tight fit.

Best feature though, is that it finally works!

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