CalendarReview

Presdo just launched their new, innovative event scheduling tool. According to the website, Presdo “takes the hassle out of trying to find the best time to get together with people. Use Presdo to minimize the annoying ping pong of email, texting, and voicemail when organizing the next team lunch or trying to grab coffee with a friend. ”

Presdo is entirely web-based and has a simple natural language interface for entering the information needed to create events. It can export events to many calendars, such as Microsoft Outlook, Google Calendar, Yahoo Calendar, and Apple iCal.

The company was started by one of LinkedIn’s founders.

Online travel organization startup TripIt will today release some new features that aim to further simplify booking travel online. TripIt now syncs itineraries with any personal calendar that supports iCal, including Google Calendar, Outlook 2007, Plaxo, and others. What this means is that TripIt users no longer need to manually update their calenders with trip information; TripIt now does it all, adding details such as flights, hotels, rental cars, restaurant reservations to supported apps.

AppleInsider posts this extensive and thorough article about the upcoming MS Entourage 2008 and compares it to iCal and Mail.

With the Mac OS X Leopard release iCal is getting 12 new features/upgrades. Most of them are aimed at business users. With more free/busy options, office hours, CalDAV Group Scheduling and reserve rooms iCal is moving towards an app more suited for office environments. Nice improvements but for the average user the improved interface with an event dropbox are the main enhancements. Read about all the new features on the Mac OS X website.

Erik Kennedy wrote this great articel about iCal’s 5th birthday (congrats!!) and the future:

July 17 might not seem like that significant of a date for Mac users, but for those of us with a little too much free time on our hands, it’s a cause for (minor) celebration. Today is iCal Synchronicity Day, the one day of the year where iCal’s Dock icon actually reflects the proper date even when not open.

Check out the rest of his post.

See what people are saying about iCal on Technorati

With the help of more than 10,000 beta testers, Spanning Sync continues to identify and fix bugs. Version 1.0b14 (135) is now available for download. This version fixes some serious bugs introduced in v1.0b13, so it’s a mandatory upgrade

Spanning Sync is still under construction but it will allow Mac users to perform bidirectional (can edit on both sides) sync of calendar events between Apple iCal and Google Calendar. On their blog you will find a screencast. Looks promissing.

What iCal says about itself:

Your days brim with appointments and activities: your daughter’s soccer practice, your son’s violin lesson, your neighbor’s dinner party. You need an easy-to-use tool that not only helps you stay on top of your events but lets others in your life do so as well. Enter iCal 2.

Merlin Mann posted his best iCal tips on his 43Folders blog:

Wow. It’s been over nine months since I quit Entourage in favor of the kGTD/iCal productivity tag-team. In that time, I could have had an infant, finished a school year, or been responsible for a couple failed sitcoms. (I mean: if I had a uterus, was still in college, and were, say, McLean Stevenson)

Yes, friends, I do still spend a lot of my day shaking my hammy fist in impotent rage at iCal’s numerous shortcomings, but I’ve reached a kind of détente with Apple’s stock calendaring app, and along the way I’ve discovered some modest ways to squeeze more drops of Cupertino-y goodness from its moist Jolly Rancher-like pages. Here’s a few of my favorites.

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