Reviewed 03 Aug 2009 – Version 2.1

If you are like me, trying to remember dates, especially anniversaries, is a hopeless tasks. For many years I got into more trouble than I ever imagine. I will spare you from the details, let me just say that since the beginning of this year my life has been so much easier, thanks to Dates to iCal 2! Since installing the application I have missed no birthdays or anniversaries.

I did have “Show Birthdays Calendar” activated in iCal, but other than just showing the date it did not allow any alarm settings, nor did I know how old the person will be. All that changed with Dates to iCal 2, I now can set up to five (5) alarms, and configure the title within iCal to provide me with the age. By having more than one alarm available, I can send myself an email days before the event to make sure I buy a card and/or gift, set alarms to remind me the night before and/or the morning of the event. In addition to birthdays, Dates to iCal 2 allowed me to also to sync anniversaries and customs dates.

Now with the latest release (Version 2.1) Dates to iCal 2 got even better. The new version now allows for separate iCal calendars for birthdays and anniversary events so these can be synced to other devices separately. Syncing is now much faster than previous versions. Further, sub-groups now sync from the Address Book as well as top level groups. Dates to iCal 2 also allows for the titles of the events sent to iCal to be specified in the application’s preference.

Summarizing, Dates to iCal 2 does exactly what it claims to do, it automatically syncing birthday, anniversary and custom dates from the address book to iCal. Dates to iCal 2 allows each date group to have up to five alarms in iCal with the option of syncing only from a specific Address Book group or sub-group. Dates to iCal 2 also allows for the titles of the events sent to iCal to be specified in the application’s preference. Dates to iCal 2is a shareware application, running in the demo mode for three weeks before registering is required. Registration is £3 (~US$5) per machine.

Having updated to the latest version, I recommend Dates to iCal 2.1 to anyone who has to keep tracks of important dates, such as birthdays, anniversaries and/or any other important reoccurring dates, and wants to stay out of trouble because they forgot about them. John Maisey, creator and independent software developer based in London, UK, did a great job with this latest update.

BTW, John has another other nice Mac utility, YAI (You Are Invited) which is a plug-in for Apple Mail that translates and transfers Outlook, Google Calendar, Zimbra and Exchange style meeting invitations to iCal. It corrects many incompatibilities between Microsoft Exchange style meeting invites and what iCal can understand. Stay tuned for my review on YAI which is coming soon.