That’s OK, Kurt. I read it the way you meant it. I experienced the same thing myself after I created my test calendar. It’s quite common for applications to get slow if they have to handle too many data at once.
The todos in my test calendar were created by script and appear in strict chronological order in the .ics file ” and iCal’s still very slow. So it probably doesn’t make much difference. It’s the sheer number of events that iCal has to keep track of, draw on screen, update, etc. Do you really need all fifteen years of events available at once?
I really don’t need all of these calendar items loaded at once. I wish that iCal would provide a setting that allowed me to load a certain number of days or months or years of data starting with today and proceeding back that amount. It would also load all future items automatically. It would then dynamically load and unload data as I transitioned backwards and forwards in calendar time. Sounds like a suggestion for Apple.
Despite its sluggishness, I’ve really come to like iCal in these past two weeks. (The sluggishness will go away with a new machine some day.) I’ve created an Address Book group called “Anniversaries” in which I enter a couple’s wedding anniversary date into the birthday field. For example, I would enter “Mary’s & Tom’s wedding anniversary” into the “first name” field, and then enter their wedding anniversary into the birthday field. I don’t enter any other data. iCal displays “Mary’s & Tom’s wedding anniversary’s birthday” on the respective date of their anniversary. If a future version of iCal supports displaying anniversaries from Address Book, it will be simple to delete the contents of this group. The records for both Mary and Tom already contain their correct anniversary dates. I realize that a few add-ons could do this for me, but I avoid installing software unnecessarily. I run a very lean and minimalist software configuration on my Macs.
Do you subscribe to any calendars? I subscribe only to two: US Holidays and Earth Seasons. My wife subscribes to US Holidays and UK Holidays. Do you know of any sources of calendars besides iCalShare and iCalWorld? I am quite particular about installing externals on our Macs. As I said in the previous paragraph, I run a very lean and minimalist software configuration.
Are you using iCal from Tiger or iCal from Leopard? I’m using iCal 2.0.5 from Tiger. I wonder if iCal 3 addresses the speed issues that I’ve read a lot about that exist in iCal 2.
Perhaps when Apple thinks enough people have crowded iCal calendars going back fifteen years.
I only looked at iCal for the first time a few months ago, to further an off-list discussion I was having with Adam Bell. I liked it almost immediately. Before that, I was perfectly happy with a personal organiser and a 2B pencil. I’ve never bothered with Address Book, so I’m the only person in mine. I turned off the birthdays link in iCal’s preferences and made my own Birthdays/Anniversaries calendar ” obviously just a matter of entering each birthday/anniversary into the calendar as an all-day event and setting it to recur on the same day every year. iCal understands more iCalendar recurrence rules than can be set through its GUI, so if I had a friend with a birthday on 29th February, I could script a recurrence rule to make an event recur either on the 60th day of each year (1st March in non-leap years) or on the last day of February.
Subscribing and publishing are beyond my current level of interest. I made my own UK Bank Holidays calendar. The May Day, Spring, and August Bank Holidays are easily set to recur on the first Monday in May, the last Monday in May, and the last Monday in August repectively. Unfortunately, the other holidays aren’t “recurrible” [?] in iCal. Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, and New Year’s Day occur on fixed dates, but if any of these occur on a Saturday or Sunday, the holidays associated with them are deferred to the following Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday. Easter is at a different time each year, so the Good Friday and Easter Monday Bank Holidays depend on that. I wrote a script to calculate these holidays for the next ten years (it could do more, but one has to be sensible!) and to enter them into iCal as individual events.
2.0.5 in Tiger, but I was inspired enough by it to download version 1.5.5 too, which works on my eight-years-old, Jaguar-running PowerBook. The two versions are very similar in GUI and ability, but organise themselves differently in the background. 1.5.5 doesn’t have the Address Book link, its .ics files are kept together in a ~/Library/Calendars/ folder, and their names reflect those of the calendars themselves ” “Home.ics”, “Bank Holidays.ics”, etc. The big scripting difference is that 1.5.5’s calendars have ‘titles’ rather than ‘names’:
tell application "iCal"
set theCalendar to first calendar whose title is "Home" -- 1.5.5.
set theCalendar to calendar "Home" -- 2.0.5.
set theCalendar to calendar 1 -- Either.
end tell
I experienced the same thing myself after I created my test calendar. It’s quite common for applications to get slow if they have to handle too many data at once.