Subscribe to iCal Calendars

You can subscribe to calendars that have been published by family, friends, colleagues, or total strangers. You do not have to have a .Mac account to subscribe to a calendar that's hosted on .Mac or other WebDAV servers.

A Subscribe symbol in the Calendars list indicates a calendar to which you've subscribed.

To subscribe to any iCal calendar

1.	From the Calendar menu at the top of your screen, choose "Subscribe…."
2.	In the sheet that appears, enter the calendar URL (web address) that was given to you or that you may have received in an email from the publisher of the calendar, then click the "Subscribe" button. After you click "Subscribe," checkmark the options you want to use, then click OK. Or if you know the web address of a site that offers iCalendars for subscription (such as http://apple.com/ical/library), use your browser to visit the site and click one of the available calendar links. A sheet opens with that link entered in the "Subscribe to:" field (below-left). Click "Subscribe," then checkmark the options you want to use, then click OK.
3.	If subscription to the calendar requires a password, an "Authentication" dialog window opens. Enter the required user name and password, then click OK to continue.
4.	The subscribed calendar appears in your Calendars list. Click it's checkbox show it in the main viewing area.

Other calendars available for subscription

In addition to subscribing to the calendars of friends, family, and colleagues, there are many special-interest calendars available online to which you can subscribe. It's quite amazingthere are public calendars that list special events, sports teams, school calendars, religious events, movies, television, and many more. Visit these sites to see some of the possibilities: From the Calendar menu choose "Find Shared Calendars…." to visit www.apple.com/ical/library, Apple's web site of published caledars. Visit www.iCalshare.com to choose from a large collection of published calendars.

Refresh calendars

To make sure that you see the most current version of a subscribed calendar, you can manually refresh it. Refresh downloads the current calendar from the server, ensuring that you have the latest published information. If you don't have a full-time connection, make sure you dial up to connect to the Internet before you choose to refresh.

1.	Select a subscribed calendar in the Calendars list.
2.	From the Calendar menu at the top of your screen, choose "Refresh."

When you first subscribe to a calendar, you can set up an automatic schedule that determines how often the subscribed calendar is updated:

1.	From the Calendar menu, choose "Subscribe…."
2.	Click the "Refresh" checkbox, then from that pop-up menu, choose a time interval (every 15 minutes, every hour, every day, or every week) to set how often your computer downloads a new version of the subscribed calendar.

This automatic refresh technique is very convenient if you have a full-time Internet connection. If you have a dial-up connection iCal will alert you when it's trying to connect to the Internet, so you'll probably want to set the refresh schedule for every day or every week instead of every 15 minutes or every hour.