#GEEKTOOL GOOGLE REMINDERS MAC OS#
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Using the preference pane, you configure a rectangular area on your desktop – effectively, a borderless window that sits (by default) in front of your desktop background and behind your desktop icons – and displays the output of a shell command. GeekTool, by Yann Bizeul, is a system preference pane along with a background application. I needed a way to make sure I was shown this data every day, automatically.īack to Ali Rantakari’s Web site, where I found him saying, in effect, “If you like icalBuddy you’re probably going to want to run it using GeekTool.” I had never heard of GeekTool, but I quickly realized that it was the missing piece of the puzzle. All I had to do was remember to run Terminal every morning and type that command, and then leave the Terminal window open all day… Uh, no. That command produces a textual list of all events upcoming in the next 40 days, without launching iCal – just the sort of thing I was after.

#GEEKTOOL GOOGLE REMINDERS FULL#

His wonderful command-line tool, icalBuddy, looked to be just the ticket.īefore you could say “the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox,” I had downloaded icalBuddy, examined the ReadMe file, double-clicked on mand, opened Terminal, and entered this little incantation: “icalBuddy eventsToday+40”. A moment’s googling brought me to the Web pages of Ali Rantakari, who has solved it indeed, and then some. Why should I do any work? Surely someone has already solved this problem for me. So in theory I could write a little app that would show me the upcoming events, just as Remember? used to do.Īt this point, however, one of my major virtues intervened – laziness. The iCal “store” (the calendrical data) itself can be queried directly through the system without launching iCal at all. And I don’t just mean via AppleScript, which requires iCal to be running. It looked like the deal was off, until I got to thinking: iCal does have one major advantage here it is eminently queryable. And that was utterly unacceptable, especially in comparison to Remember?’s wonderful view of all events upcoming in the next 40 days that has greeted me every morning for almost as long as I’ve been using a Mac. In other words, iCal doesn’t show you what’s coming up: you have to hunt, paging through the future weeks and months yourself. This means, for example, that if today is 30 July 2010 (a Friday) and you launch iCal, no view – not week view, not month view – will inform you that you have something important coming up across the week/month boundary at the start of August. The interface is fairly horrendous – configuring an event in Remember? is insanely slick and fast in comparison to all the clumsy clicking you have to do in iCal, and nothing will ever beat Remember?’s compact calendar display – but I could live with it.īut there was one thing that seriously threatened to put the kibosh on the whole deal: iCal was irreducibly organized into calendrical units. And it has a reasonably good notion of repeating events. It can post reminders (alerts) on the screen without the application itself actually running, and these can be “snoozed” temporarily, which was one of my favorite Remember? features. To my surprise, iCal proved remarkably acceptable in many ways.

#GEEKTOOL GOOGLE REMINDERS MAC OS#

But I was darned if I was going to spend any money (as I’m also a notorious cheapskate), so I started looking into iCal, which comes with Mac OS X.

#GEEKTOOL GOOGLE REMINDERS UPDATE#

Despite my offers to help port it to Cocoa, this program has been giving off that old abandonware smell since its last update three years ago, and I started looking about for a replacement. That’s the thought that occurred to me, anyway, as I contemplated having to switch away from my favorite, long-time calendering companion, Dave Warker’s Remember? (see “ Remember? Not Forgotten,” 30 June 2003).Ībandoning Remember? wasn’t going to be easy, but this utility hasn’t made the progress I’d hoped for in recent years it’s still a PowerPC app running under Rosetta in Snow Leopard, and its choice of years runs only to 2018 (believe it or not, I have events to schedule beyond that date).

The folks at Apple are supposed to eat their own dog food, but it seems to me that the people who write iCal clearly don’t use iCal. #1652: OS updates, DPReview shuttered, LucidLink cloud storage.#1653: Apple Music Classical review, Authory service for writers, WWDC 2023 dates announced.1654: Urgent OS security updates, upgrading to macOS 13 Ventura, using smart speakers while temporarily blind.

#1655: 33 years of TidBITS, Twitter train wreck, tvOS 16.4.1, Apple Card Savings, Steve Jobs ebook.#1656: Passcode thieves lock iCloud accounts, the apps Adam uses, iPhoto and Aperture library conversion in Ventura.

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