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Apple today introduced iCal, a new calendar program with built-in Internet sharing that lets business users, consumers and educators manage multiple calendars, share them over the Internet and automatically keep them updated.

Users can “publish” their iCal calendars on the web, so colleagues, friends and family members can “subscribe” and view them in iCal on their own Mac®. In addition, iCal can automatically check for updates to imported calendars on a regular basis, so shared calendars are always up to date.

“iCal lets you see all the calendars that make up your life,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “With built-in Internet sharing, iCal opens a new era of wide-area calendar sharing between colleagues, friends, family and schools.”

With iCal, Mac users can:
• keep track of schedules, appointments and tasks, viewing activities by day, week or month;
• manage and view multiple calendars at once from within one unified window to easily identify schedule conflicts or free time at-a-glance;
• publish calendars on the web to share with colleagues, family and friends;
• subscribe to other calendars to keep up with work schedules, family events, school events and more;
• send standards-based email event invitations;
• organize and keep track of activities with built-in To Do list management;
• be notified of upcoming events on screen, by email or text messaging to a mobile phone or pager; and
• quickly find any event, task or name entered into iCal using its lightning-fast search tool.

In addition, Apple’s new iSync allows users to sync their iCal calendars with the new generation of Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, PalmOS devices and the iPod� for access to their most current address books and calendars on the go.

iCal will be available as a free download this September and requires Mac OS X version 10.2 “Jaguar.” Publishing calendars on the Internet requires a .Mac membership or a WebDAV server.

Charles W. Moore

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