I covered Mail in last Wednesday’s Leopard Feature Presentation, which was one of the apps that sought to bring Mac OS X’s built-in applications in lockstep to go up against Entourage, part of Microsoft Office. But Entourage isn’t just e-mail and information management; Entourage also has an Address Book and Calendar included, which recently has been making iCal look a little, um, amateur. Not so in Leopard. iCal 3 in Leopard finally has been fully redesigned to be more professional looking and faster to use, and although those of us who regularly used iCal before will have a few new things to get used to, the new iCal overall offers a lot of stuff to be excited about.

Prior to Leopard’s release, AppleInsider did a very interesting Road to Leopard series which not only took an extended look at what was coming in Leopard, but also went through the history and origins of these features. It was interesting to learn that iCal, which was released by Apple five years ago, shortly after the release of Jaguar, was actually developed by a group of Apple employees in Paris, mostly as a demonstration of how Interface Builder and Apple’s other pre-XCode OS X Development Tools could be easily and quickly used to make rich, Cocoa-based applications. Indeed, even though iCal got a little bit more integrated during Tiger’s release, it still seemed like kind of a “separate” application that didn’t mature as fast as the rest of the operating system, especially considering how the Dock icon for iCal would uncharacteristically always say July 17, (which was the day that iCal was announced in 2002).

iCal 3 finally makes the leap of being a full-fledged Leopard application, as evidenced most clearly by the fact that the icon now always shows the right date while it’s in your Dock, even if the application is closed. (However, the auto-updating icon applies exclusively to the Dock; every other appearance of the icon will still be stuck to July 17.) The interface is also much cleaner. The iCal window adopts the iLife/Leopard style sidebar for housing your calendars, and rather than displaying little icons as before, now actually separates your personal calendars with your subscriptions, etc. The Day/Week/Month toggle and navigation arrows are now at the top of the screen, along with a dedicated Today button (which is much clearer than the diamond that was on top of the mini-calendar that used to serve as the Today button) and a new Search box. The Search box now includes a menu that you can use to refine the search with many options. The mini-calendar now is easier on the eyes, has big buttons, and actually works the way you would expect it to work during those weeks that span two different months. If you’re viewing the current day or week, iCal now shows a little line with a small red balloon at the side which indicates what the current time is, which lets you at a glance see how close you are to the next thing on your calendar. And of course, iCal’s to-dos are now integrated with the system-wide to-dos as seen in Mail and other applications.

Gone is the little inspector window that let you fine tune your event. If you double-click or do Command-I, a floating info box pops up next to the event with a summary of the details for that event. To edit the details, either click on the Edit button in that “floating inspector” or type Command-E. For someone who has had to deal with the distractive Inspector window in previous versions of iCal, this new floating window is just so much nicer.

iCal also has a number of other features for business types, in that iCal is now compatible with CalDAV servers (and Apple’s new iCal Server, built into Leopard Server, just happens to sing very nicely with CalDAV). Obviously, I don’t have a CalDAV server at my disposal, but CalDAV allows for a lot of collaborative calendar management, including scheduling meetings with groups and auto-picking meeting times based on everyone’s schedule, delegating your calendar management to a colleague, and even reserving rooms for meetings. While the average Joe won’t care much about these features, iCal’s newfound group CalDAV abilities make iCal + iCal Server an attractive alternative to Outlook/Entourage and Microsoft Exchange Server. Oh, and did I mention that CalDAV (and therefore iCal Server) is open source?

However, there was one feature that I was hoping to see. Apple and Google have this big partnership right? This same partnership brings you Google search in Safari, Google Maps in Address Book (new in Leopard), YouTube integration in iMovie and Keynote, Google Maps and AdSense in iWeb, Google integration on the iPhone, you get my drift. Wouldn’t it have been nice for Apple to have baked in some kind of syncing between iCal and Google Calendar, rather than forcing those of us who want to sync between these two services in this way to have to take advantage of a number of complex workarounds? That’s one thing that I did miss in the new iCal.

For the average user like me, though, the biggest new features in iCal 3 will be its much improved speed and its much improved interface. iCal may focus most of its new “features” towards the business/enterprise market, but the mere fact that the application feels so much more intuitive and so much more stable makes it feel like you’re holding a brand new gem up to the light, and one that is much shinier than it was before.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: calendars, Entourage, events, Exchange Server, iCal, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, management, review, to-dos