Cult of Mac today moans about iCal. I wonder if this comes from author Giles Turnbull using the application or just the oddly negative responses he and others have seen online. Nipping through the article:

Yesterday, the guys at Macworld published a useful article about making Lion’s iCal less annoying, but just as useful and entertaining were the comments beneath it.

The simple fact that Macworld felt the need to write an annoyances-fixing article speaks volumes.

Not really. People hate change. It doesn’t really matter what you do to an application: when you change some of it, people will get pissed off and want to change it back.

One good suggestion was to avoid iCal altogether, and buy another calendar app. Apple’s iCal is designed in such a way that it stores its event data in a database, which other apps can access. If you’re already an iCal user, it’s easy to try out alternative calendar apps without having to export and import your data, as long as they support use of iCal events. Most of them do, these days. One of my favorites is QuickCal.

I admit that I was initially tempted to try an alternative to iCal, but I decided to stick with it. For a little context, it’s worth explaining how I use iCal. I block in events across four calendars: work, home, and two ‘urgent’ versions of each. For magazine articles and other work, I create an event that approximates how long I think a piece of work will take, and I block recurring commissions as far into the future as possible. This enables me to see if, say, October is full and that I really shouldn’t be taking on extra cover features unless I somehow figure out how to clone myself. I then use iCal to manage my daily work, deleting events as I complete the relevant task, or, for personal/home things, as the event passes.

For me, there are only three things I really dislike about the new iCal:

  • The visual design is hideous. I suspect this is Apple very intentionally starting the transition to iOS-like apps in OS X and that we’re going to see more skeuomorphic user interface design in forthcoming revisions to the system. It’s a pity, because the ‘leather’ toolbar is distracting and the text on it isn’t as readable as it is in other apps. Next to the smart, sleek new Mail, iCal just looks like a kiddie app; it’s even at odds with its own smart preferences pane. But this isn’t a deal-breaker, even if I did hack out the ‘torn paper’ graphic under the toolbar.
  • Apple removed the mini-calendar sidebar, which I used daily to rapidly navigate my events. Navigation is now a little slower, but this also isn’t a deal-breaker.
  • It’s mildly more awkward to create an event in a specific calendar, although you can click-hold the ‘add event’ button to select a calendar or very easily switch calendar once an event is created. This is very much not a deal-breaker.
But there are also some things I really like about the new iCal:
  • The full-screen view is very good, and really helps me focus on my events, without getting distracted by other apps. It’s also one of the few Apple apps that works nicely in full-screen on a 27-inch iMac.
  • The gestural controls mostly work nicely, providing a quick means to move from day to day or week to week.
  • The new Day view is utterly fantastic. It shows your events on the right, but also a simpler text-based list of upcoming appointments on the left. I’ve wanted this kind of feature in iCal for a long time, and now it’s here, it’s hugely improved my workflow in the app.
  • The Year view is interesting, providing a ‘heat map’ of how busy any given day is. This provides a useful ‘at a glance’ overview of how mental any one day, week or month is, so you can more easily schedule events.
On balance, I think iCal is a worthwhile update. Also, I suspect that had Apple not distracted everyone with the awful leather toolbar, it would have been championed in the same way Mail has (mostly) been. Although I think it’s very unlikely, here’s hoping Apple provides a checkbox in an upcoming version of OS X, which enables you to revert iCal to a more standard look.