Publish multiple calendars as one with iCal

iCal receives a lot of criticism, but I think that it is an excellent application. It has a few usibility issues and interface quirks, but I think that it’s swell overall. It is a simple, ellegant mail application that is pleasant to look at and simple to use. It’s implementation of and support for the standard icalendar file format is one of the strongest places where it shines though. Good work, Apple, for continuing your efforts to embrace, support, and promote standards. Here’s to hoping that iCal 3.0 fixes some of the outstanding issues and surprizes us with some slick, new features.

My reason for writing today however isn’t just to sing iCal’s general praise, but to specifically point out it’s powerful publish feature. I manage several user groups and publish calendars for each to a remote server with iCal. This process is quick, efficient, and seamless. I add to and edit the calendars locally in iCal and the changes are then automatically synchronized to the server. Group members can either view the calendar in the web-based PHP iCalendar viewer or subscribe to the feed locally in their own copy of iCal. What a powerful and proficient use of technology! This (syndication and web-enabled applications) is what I believe to be one of the most exciting and useful uses of the internet.

For a new project that I am working on though, I was looking to publish a calendar of events from several different sources. Agregating this isn’t something that I wanted to do manually. Well, I am pleased to report that iCal didn’t let me down. Using a Calendar Group (basically a folder containing one or more calendars), I was able to combine both local calendars that I created myself (and here’s the beautiful part) and syndicated calendars that I had subscribed to and then re/publish the entire thing as one combined calendar!