A painting of me

Quicksilver + iCal

   13 December 2005, lunch time

I use Quicksilver to open applications in Mac OS X quickly. This is one thing Quicksilver does well. However, to use Quicksilver as a glorified application launcher is a bit of a waste. Yesterday I thought I’d try and figure out how to add events to my iCal calender using Quicksilver. I had already installed the iCal plugin, so I had two actions I could do with a snippet of text: create an iCal event or create a To-Do in iCal. The plugin is quite smart. If you create a new event, it analyzes the text you enter to figure out when the event takes place. For example, “Dinner tomorrow with Prasanna” gets scheduled tomorrow, though the time seems to picked in an arbitrary fashion; “Concert Thursday with Matt” gets scheduled on Thursday of this week; if you enter an actual date, it will schedule it on that date. The redundant date information is a small nuisance, but is worth the productivity boost you get form being able to enter iCal events from anywhere without having to use iCal itself. I haven’t been able to find any documentation whatsoever for this plugin. I feel like asking for the source code so I can read through it and figure out what it does myself.

Update: The documentation for the plugin is now online.

 

Comments

  1. try using the form: “DATE—title” (two hyphens)

  2. I tried this – awesome! I just started writing it this morning, and a friend found me yours. Much better.

    Do you have a dictionary of the rough terms supported? (ie “Poker tonight for 2 hours at 7pm” or something?)

    How can I choose which calendar to put events into?

    Why when I say tonight does it file it as yesterday? Timezone issues maybe?

    Is this the best place to ask thse questions?

  3. This probably isn’t the best place to ask questions, because I am really not associated in anyway with Quicksilver. There is a forum over at Blacktree, you might find more information there. I actually was thinking about writing up the docs for this feature, assuming I could find the information. If I do, I’ll post that information here.

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