Mac user Adam Laiacano came up with a neat way to embed his iCal calendar on his desktop—in text, using our favourite text calendar, Remind. You've already seen how to keep your calendar in plain text with Remind, and embed it on your desktop using GeekTool. Laiacano came up with AppleScript that converts his iCal calendar into Remind-friendly files to get the best of both worlds—the pretty iCal GUI, and the GeekTool text heads-up display. After the jump, see Laiacano's desktop in full and get the script.

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FuseCal is a web app that does something so useful, yet so seemingly rare, that it's hard to believe it's both free and easy to use. The app, currently in alpha, lets you add iCal-based calendars (and a few other formats) to a master calendar, then choose whether all those events, just the ones you pick, or events filtered by keyword will be synced to Outlook, Apple iCal, Google Calendar, or another program. I've only had time to test the Google Calendar->FuseCal->Outlook setup, and it seems to work. Those with web sites can also publish their combined FuseCals on their site. FuseCal is free to use; a sign-up lets you keep your calendars in sync.

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Mac OS X only: AppleScripter John Maisey offers an iCal utility that deletes duplicate events in iCal calendars. If one too many sync operations left your calendars with multiple instances of the same event, the Delete iCal Duplicates script will clean those up for you. Now available for both Tiger and Leopard, the Delete iCal Duplicates script is a free download for Mac only, donations appreciated.

Mac OS X only: Now that Leopard's got Cover Flow in Finder and a central calendar store, you can search for events and tasks and preview them all big and pretty-like right in Finder. The Mac OS X Hints blog details how. (The two tricks: make sure you use the kind:ical operator and that you include Spotlight items in your search critreria). Neat way for iCal/Mail to-do users to search that data without launching the apps.

Mac OS X only: Freeware, single-use application Do-It provides a quick and simple way to create new iCal appointments without the clicking frenzy required with iCal's default interface. Just launch it whenever you want to add a new appointment, fill out the details (the form is completely Tab-friendly), hit enter and go back to whatever you were doing. It's a simple but wonderful improvement to iCal if the default behaviour has ever gotten on your nerves. Do-It is a free download, Mac OS X only.

Leopard's new and improved iChat boasts two features that are sure to enhance both workplace productivity and friends and family tech support: screen sharing and document sharing. In a nutshell, iChat now makes it dead simple to review documents with one or multiple chat partners in what it calls iChat theatre (pictured) or share screens—either your screen or the screen of the person you're chatting with—VNC-style. That means that not only can you see what's going on with the other person's screen; you can also control it.

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Virtual desktops have been popular amongst geeks for years, but they're just starting to catch on with the consumer desktop crowd; in Leopard, Spaces be thy name. Previously Mac users had an incredible virtual desktop application called Virtue Desktops as their desktop management option, but with the announcement of Spaces, development on Virtue Desktops was dropped. I'm a huge fan of Virtue Desktops, so in my eyes, Spaces has some pretty big shoes to fill. So how does Spaces stand up?

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One thing that Windows and Outlook have always had up on the Mac's default email and calendar apps, Mail and iCal, is Outlook's integrated to-do manager. Today the game changes. Leopard's new Mail and iCal applications introduce their own take on the email- and calendar-integrated to-do list. So now the question is: Is it any good? The answer: Yes. And no. But probably yes. The To Do manager, at the moment, is a bit of a mishmash of some very good and a few bad—or at least unrealized—features.

The Mail.app To Do feature resides in the Reminders panel of the Mail sidebar below Notes. Mail to-dos can be organized by due date, priority (high, medium, low, or none), title, and calendar (that's right, they also integrate with iCal). You can create a new to-do in a couple of ways.

First, click the To Do button in the toolbar. You'll jump straight to the To Do window, where you can enter the details of a new item. Alternately, you can create your to-dos from Notes (another new feature in Mail). Once you've written a note, you can convert any line of the note or the entire note into one or several to-dos. The strange-yet-interesting thing about to-do notes is that the new to-do will appear in the To Do screen as well as the note, and you can check it off in either place. In fact, you can check off to-dos in a third place as well: iCal.

iCal's organisation of to-dos is much more convenient than Mail's To Do view, if only for its more prominent focus on due dates and priorities and its sidebar display (so you can view to-dos along with application content). To get a look at your to-do list within iCal, just click the thumb tack button on the bottom right of iCal. From there, you can check off your to-dos, re-prioritise, or change other information by double-clicking the item.

My biggest gripe about Mail's implementation of to-dos is that you can't create a new to-do from an email (or anything else, for that matter) via drag and drop. Also, the Notes integration is completely bizzare since Apple dropped the ball on supporting iPhone-to-Mail syncing of notes. As is, it comes off like a pointless appendage to Mail.app.

Another little bug I ran into: I couldn't change the due date of a to-do from Mail when iCal was open. Instead, I had to change the date inside iCal—though I would assume this will be fixed with an update.

In the end, to-do lovers have a promising addition to Apple's email and calendar apps, but considering the breadth of full-featured alternative to-do list managers that have popped up in the absence of one from Apple (including ones that integrate with iCal in one way or another), it's tough to say whether Leopard's To Do feature will catch on for the hardcore list keeper.

All platforms: Add tasks, set appointments and keep on top of your schedule with Mozilla Sunbird and Lightning, the free calendar managers that function as a stand-alone client or extension to the Thunderbird e-mail program. Version 0.7 of Sunbird/Lightning touts a redesign of the user interface and task-adding dialog, along with user-requested functions like adding tasks in different timezones, more customizable recurring events and an improved "Today" glance panel. Sunbird and Lightning store information in a SQLite format, but can also work with iCal data or Google Calendar through an extension. Both are free downloads and work on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.

Invite guests, add events directly to your preferred calendar software, or share post-party photos and blogs at Windows Live Events, Microsoft's foray into the online event planning field. In addition to standard online invitation features seen at Evite and other spots, Live Events allows the anticipated weather for an event to be displayed, along with pictures and maps chosen by the host. Live Events requires a Windows Live sign-up to use and can pull contacts from Hotmail accounts, but allows syncing through iCal, Google, and Yahoo calendars, along with Outlook.