-I can’t print the company and person in the address field, it is one or the other.

Any work around that you would suggest?

Thanks again.

Thanks for your comment. In one of my later posts, found here:
http://www.maccast.com/2006/10/04/back-to-basics-of-mac-os-x-part-3-leveraging-contacts-in-os-x-apps/

I linked to an app called Dates to iCal:
http://www.nhoj.co.uk/

which purports to do what you want to do with Address Book events to iCal. Please let me know if it does the job for you, I haven’t tried it. If anyone else has any experience with Dates to iCal, please let us know.

As for the second part of your question, you’re right, iCal doesn’t display this quite right, unless you check the “All Day” box. However, that’s only the case for the month display. If you look at the week display, it does it right, even without All Day checked. I don’t know if the week layout suits your purpose, but I thought I’d mention it.

Hopefully the rumored iCal updates in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard will address these issues.

I’m hoping you can offer some additional tips please:
1. I like the “Birthday” integration with iCal. As a home user, I like to sync my address book contacts with my phone/pda and many of my contacts are a couple, or family who share one home email address. The fields in the address book only allow for one “birthday” entry. I have already added additional name fields for “Spouse” and “child” and I can add additional “date” fields, which I can rename for their respective birthdays. But, how do I integrate those dates with iCal? Is there another method of including additional “birthday” fields in Address Book?

2. I travel extensively for a living as an airline pilot and I used to put my monthly schedule into MS Outlook, synch it with my phone/PDA and print it out for the wife to have it available on the fridge! My problem lies with a multi-day entry: – example: If I entered a planned route ABC-DEF-XYZ-ABC, which departed my home base at 9am on 01 January, returning at 10pm on 04 January. In Outlook when I put the details as above, it would add a colour “bar”, indicating a “busy” appointment, (assigned to category “work”) from 09:00 Jan 01 to 22:00 Jan 04, and both the start and end times were visible over these dates on the PC and in the printed version.
In Entourage, it only displayed the start time and I would have to enter the end time into the “details” field (now reading “ABD-DEF-XYZ-ABC 22:00″).
iCal also only displays the strat time, BUT… the “busy” category or calender colour assigned to “work” only shows up on the day the event starts (Jan 01). The only way I can depict that I am “busy/away” for the entire period, is by manually entering both start and finish times into the “event” title/description and mark the event as “All Day”. This is just time consuming and frustrating. Apple MUST have a way of doing this. Please say they do?

I hope this all makes sense. Many thanks,
Chris

You’re right–Smart Groups are a step forward, but the queries may not be robust enough. It’s too bad.

This isn’t perfect, but here’s a temporary work around. Instead of using Country field, you could add the country name in the Notes field of the card. It’s possible you may already have the name of the country in the Note field already, so you may want to make it unique in some way–like maybe starting it with a ‘C’. Like this:

“CBrazil”

Then in the Smart Group query, select Note and have it contain “CBrazil” for that specific Group.

I wonder if you could create an Automator script to automate this process, of adding the “C + Country” to the notes field, or if there’s an Apple Script that could do it.

Anyone out there want to give Craig a hand?

I’m quite a traveller and the one thing that drives me nuts about the smart folder function in address book is the lack of “country” > “is not set”. Why can I organise by zip code (which no-one outside of the USA has!) but not by country!

So close but so far…

Thanks for the warm words of welcome! I’m really looking forward to writing for the MacCast Blog with Adam and the other new bloggers, and interacting more folks like you in the Mac community. For and by Mac geeks, right?

As for responding to your Quicktime question, I’d prefer to leave the more informed answer to someone who might know the technical specifics.

However, it may be an important distinction to note that Quicktime is both an application (which can play, record, and transcode many different formats) as well as a video format.

It might help to take a look at the Wikipedia page on Quicktime for more info:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QuickTime#QuickTime_file_format

Although, I already knew most of the information here. It doesn’t to read it as a review and undoubtedly will help tons to recent switchers.

Have a wonderful Sunday everyone.