Paolo posted about iCal the other day. iCal is the calendaring software that Apple just announced last week. On first glance I was fairly underwhelmed with what I saw it iCal. But as I looked at it more and explored what Apple was doing with it I started to see where it could be a very useful application (It is still very much a 1.0 product and needs a bit of work though).

The biggest thing iCal lets you do is publish your calendars. It is set up so that once you have a calendar of events in your life, all you have to do is tell it to publish and it will show up on a web page. Here's one that I did for a club calendar. The cool thing is that it is that you can subscribe to calendars that are posted on the net. These each show up as a different category in your own calendar. iCal will even go and check to see if these are updated periodicly.

Upon further researching. I found that Apple used a standard file format for sharing their calendar informaion. Mozilla Calendar is another app that seems to support this. Searching around I found more information on the formats for calendars and contact information. Even MS seems to support these formats.

Now Apple just needs to clean up iCal a little bit more and things will be even better.