Working with iCal’s Shared Calendars

iCalendar is one of the first applications that made me lust for a Mac. In many ways it’s the essence of an OS X application, both beautiful and functional.

One great way to make iCal a little more usable is by subscribing to shared calendars.

A shared calendar is a calendar that is maintained by somebody else, that you’re able to view inside iCal. One popular example of this is a holidays calendar, shown below:

This way you don’t have to manage every individual holiday yourself.

Some great places to find shared calendars are at Apple and iCalShare.

Creating Your own Shared Calendars

Another interesting aspect of shared calendars is creating your own and sharing them among friends and family. One great example would be sharing a calendar of everybody’s birthdays and anniversaries.

To do this you need an iDisk or a free alternative to iDisk. Then in the menubar, go to Calendar -> Publish.

If you have an .Mac account you can click Publish. Otherwise you’ll have to enter your Box.net details as a private server, then click Publish.

To easily access this URL you can Control+Click the calendar and select “Copy URL to Clipboard” or “Send Publish Email.”

If you’re not using a public server (like Box.net), make sure you send the username/password.

Shared calendars are a great way to share information without the pain of updating individual calendars.