iCal (with some WebDAV fu)

Feeling a little more adveturous, I found some discussion over at Mac OS X Hints about how to enable the WebDAV module in the Apache Web server on your own machine. The goal here is to have something local that iCal can publish and subscribe to. I managed to get it working to a basic level. It's still not totally secure. I would be happy with it as-is on my LAN, but since I take the iBook out and connect to public wireless networks, I want to have things more locked down. Anyhow, I can publish my iCal calendar that has been synchronized with my PDA to a local folder managed by the WebDAV service, and can subscribe to it from another account so that my calendar can be composited with my wife's calendar in her iCal, and I can also pusblish hers to do the same in my account. The beauty of iCal is the separate calendars that can be switched on and off to put them together without having to actually merge them.

The parts of iCal that I don't like so far are the printing and syncing of to-dos. Printing the to-dos on the calendar has some poor alignment, but I'm wondering if that is a printer issue as Safari has something sort of similar. Curently, I've chosen to use iSync to sync with my Palm. The to-dos go into iCal, but since iCal's equivalent of Palm categories is the separate calendars, and Palm doesn't have categories for its calendar items, iSync puts all the to-dos into the same single calendar it syncs the Palm calendar events into. This makes working with the to-dos more difficult on the computer than on the Palm, but I usually work with them on the Palm anyway. It's just nice to have them show up in iCal, but since it lists all my to-dos, you can't really print a calendar with them included. I really would like an option to just include dated to-dos on the calendar. Another small annoyance is the iCal alarm pop-ups. It doesn't seem I can dismiss them with a keystroke that I've found yet.

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