I use Apple’s iCal a fair bit, and generally speaking, it gets the calendar-and-scheduling job done with a minimum of fuss, a maximum of style, and a not unreasonable degree of functionality.
But there’s one thing – and, like usual, it’s one of the small things – that really bugs the heck out of me. iCal has no date picker:
What this means is that when I’m entering a to-do item, and I want to give it a due date, I actually have to type in “06” for the month, “tab” to get to the next field, “06” for the day, “tab” to get to the next field, and then the year if it’s different than the default. This is ridiculous.
The simplest online calendar has a simple, user-friendly date picker that you click on and gives you a little pop-up. You navigate to the date you want with a couple of clicks, select it, and presto! the due date is set. This one is from our Discover Zone:
This is dead easy, and the only possible reason it’s not in iCal is that the iCal development team does not eat its own dogfood: they don’t use their own software. If they did, and if they ever entered a couple of to-do items, they’d realize that a simple date-picker would vastly improve the user experience.
Agreed. One of the 100 top reasons that I use Now Up-To-Date instead of iCal. There’s so many little of these “attention to detail” things in Now Up-To-Date that look like they will never be in iCal. I’ve never found a better calendar program for the Mac than Now Up-To-Date.