Smelly. Puppy.

There’s quite a few people who have written about how to use QuickCal w/ Google delegate calendars, or non-primary Google calendars. This actually isn’t a simple thing to set up in Mac OS 10.6 (MUCH easier in 10.7), so I wanted to give you a quick how-to.

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If you don’t know, Alfred is one of the hottest app launcher applications out there today. If you haven’t checked it out, grab it off the Mac App Store (download link). It makes finding apps and documents extremely simple, and amazingly this app is free! I’ve been using the app for months, and it’s one of those things you can’t live without once you start using it. (If you love Alfred, make sure you support their devs and check out the Alfred Power Pack!)

Prior to the release of QuickCal 2.3 (MAS Link), the developer of Alfred came to us with a great idea – why not do some work to QuickCal that would enable a really slick/streamlined integration directly into Alfred? What an awesome idea! So, with his suggestion and some work between our teams, we think we have a great solution for you.

Here’s how to link these two awesome apps together!

Step 1: Click this link: QuickCal/Alfred Auto-Configuration, and say ‘Oh Yes!’ to Alfred when it asks if you want to import the custom QuickCal search.

Step 2: The next time you launch Alfred, if you’d like to enter a QuickCal entry, just preceed what you’d type in QuickCal normally with the word ‘cal’.

Step 3: Hit enter, and QuickCal window will show up to allow you to confirm all entries are correct. Hit enter, and you’re done!

The next release of QuickCal will support an even MORE streamlined integration, where you will have the option of creating QuickCal events directly from Alfred without the extra confirmation step in QuickCal! This is a bit dangerous for new users (without any feedback in Alfred for what was created), but for our long-time QuickCal users we think this is will be a great addition!

And we know there’s some of you using other app launchers – Christian has written up a nice post on integration into them as well. Feel free to contribute to this post if you use an app launcher not listed.

QuickCal received some cool European press today… And what happens when you receive cool writeups from two awesome German language websites in one day? (besides regretting that I forgot most of what I learned in 4 years of high school german classes many years ago??)

QuickCal erleichtert das iCal-Leben [apfeltheater.ch]

QuickCal – So macht iCal wieder Spaß! [apfelquak.de]

… That’s right – we’re actively working on localizing QuickCal into German! The first release will focus solely on the event parsing/recognition engine. (Übung nächsten Dienstag 1400?) (Don’t worry – Christian speaks native German, so he’ll help me along.)

Another cool item from the international front – Studio Bison tossed this screencast (of an old version of QC) up on YouTube about a week ago. I think he’s from Japan…

If you want to see a new screencast, check out the video on this page!.. Thanks to Christian Bender for the great work putting this together!

I’ve seen a few negative reviews in the App Store about times not being reflected accurately. Things like:

I was upset to find that the appointments entered with this app came up ONE HOUR LATER on my iPhones main calendar. I depend on alarms as reminders and that means all my reminders rang ONE HOUR LATE. All my appointments also show one hour later than the app shows. This is unacceptable for a calendar utility. Please fix!

And one more:

This calendar was great upon first utilizing it..and I still think it will be useful, however, buyer beware that it changed all the appointments it had imported from my iCal to an hour later!!!! Luckily I answered the phone when my vet called to remind me of my appt

These issues don’t impact many people (those who live and work mainly from one timezone) – but others, it may.

So, what’s a dev to do to work on these? Fly 1500 miles to the west and cross a couple time zones, and replicate the issue. (Okay, that may not have been the sole purpose for the trip). But, issue replicated, and here’s the problem:

QuickCal deals with times localized to your current time zone. Phone is in San Fran, and you create an event at 6pm? The event is created for 6pm Pacific Time.

Here’s the problem – There is an iCal setting on your iPhone (under Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> Time Zone Support), which if turned on (by default I believe it IS turned on), will cause iCal (and iCal alone) on your phone to localizes times to whatever timezone is picked there. This setting is there to support people who do quick trips out of their timezone, and want to ensure that an 8am meeting in Chicago tomorrow doesn’t show as a 6am meeting the day before if you happen to be on the west coast.

So, if you’re on the west coast, and that Time Zone Support setting is set to Chicago (example), entering an event into QuickCal for 6pm will immediately show up in iCal as 8pm. iCal is showing that 6pm time expressed in Central time. (And where things can get really messy is if you really wanted it at 6pm pacific, went into iCal, changed it from 8pm (central) to 6pm – and now what you’ve really done is switched the event to 4pm pacific (6pm central)). Head hurt yet?

… and Apple doesn’t currently give app developers access to that setting.

I will work on copying the Apple settings options for the time zone support and pull them into QuickCal in the next version, but there’s things you can do to fix the display issue right away:

1) If you want appointments to always show relative to the time zone you are currently in (and not pinned to some other time zone), change the phone setting for Time Zone Support to OFF

2) If you’re experiencing off-by-1/2/3 hours on your appointments, but you normally don’t switch time zones, there’s a really, really good chance that your Time Zone Support is ON, but you have the wrong time zone selected in that setting option. Verify that and fix it.

BTW, it really helps if people come to the forums to report problems as I have no direct way to respond or troubleshoot to individual app reviews.

Just wanted to give a status since there hasn’t been an app update in a while…

There are some HUGE additions to QuickCal Mobile that are nearing completion. A guess a bit of a teaser would be to tell you that there’s a lot of different ways you can visualize your events than just a list of them (that can only go forward in time by 28 days)…

These multiple additions we’re making are in addition to some really nice enhancements to the language parsing engine.

Everything is very close to being completed, and then we’ll have a few days for some polish. Stay tuned!

(We’re still looking for more beta testers too!)