Subscribe to Calendars

You saw earlier how you can share your calendars and allow others to view them on a web page. Your friends, family, and coworkers who have iCal can also subscribe to your calendars, so they can always have your latest schedule visible in their copy of iCal.

To subscribe to a calendar, you need to know its URL, which you saw earlier in the Calendar Published dialog. Either send this URL to the people you want to access your calendar, or direct them to its web page, where they can click the Subscribe link. Or, if they received an e-mail message inviting them to share your calendar, they merely have to click its link to activate iCal and subscribe to your calendar.

If not, you can subscribe to a calendar by selecting Calendar | Subscribe. The Subscribe sheet is then displayed.

Enter the URL of the calendar in the Calendar URL field; this is the URL that begins with webcal. Check Refresh, and select a frequency if you want iCal to check regularly and update the calendar. This is a good idea if you have a permanent Internet connection and need to stay up-to-date with the latest changes.

Check Remove Alarms so the calendar doesn’t alert you to its events; however, uncheck this if you want alarms to activate. Check Remove To Do Items if you don’t want to see the To Do items on the calendar.

After you have done this, click Subscribe, and the calendar will be added to your Calendars list.

Subscribe to Other Calendars

Since you can subscribe to calendars, you can imagine that you’re not just limited to those made by your friends, family, or coworkers. You can subscribe to many other calendars, containing holidays, sports schedules, entertainment events, school test dates, and more. If you go to Apple’s iCal Library (www.apple.com/ical/library), you’ll find plenty of calendars to subscribe to.

You can start by subscribing to a holiday calendar. Subscribe to US Holidays, for example, and each holiday displays as an all-day event.

If you live in a different country, or work with people in other countries, you can subscribe to holiday calendars for those countries as well. And, if you’re an iCal junkie, you can find hundreds of calendars to subscribe to at iCalShare (www.icalshare.com). As of press time, this site contains more than 1,500 calendars, for sports teams, birthdays, academic schedules, TV, movies, and much more.

Tip

To remove any calendar you’ve subscribed to, just click it in the Calendars list to select it, and then press DELETE.