gods wear hats

I’ve been using iCal on Snow Leopard for about three months or so (I was on the pre-release program) as a replacement for Entourage. My company uses Microsoft Exchange for mail and calendar, and I thought it would be valuable to record my experiences with using Mail and iCal. I’d been using Entourage for both mail and calendar for over a year and had become somewhat frustrated by the unintuitive interface, so I was excited to be replacing it.

Setting up mail to work on Mail.app is very simple, assuming your Exchange server is correctly set up. Put in your e-mail address and password, and poof! it’s done. Calendaring on iCal set up must happen automatically as I don’t recall ever having to do anything there.

Mail has a somewhat frustrating keyboard shortcut for send (Cmd-Shift-D) compared to the Cmd-Enter of Entourage. That was my only real gripe, although I’ve been using Mail for long enough that this is really just a matter of retraining the fingers. Mail crashed and froze a couple of times importing all my e-mail from Exchange (I had about 20,000 messages, plus attachments) but eventually it got there. I can use the same security certificate to sign and encrypt e-mail as I did with Entourage, with no extra set up required, which was awesome. Typical mail use throughout the day is generally better, as the Mail app is more responsive and intuitive than Entourage, and integrates properly with all my other apps.

iCal however falls short in a lot of ways. Historically, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with iCal, primarily due to the months I spent writing SyncBridge, a failed app that was designed to fix a lot of the shortcomings of iCal. (Why did it fail? A buggy Apple API in Tiger (Sync Services, deprecated in Leopard) combined with Apple announcing their Calendar Server and me burning out trying to write the app while holding down a day job – I feel this historical context is important as I have no doubt it biases me). However, I was keen to give iCal the benefit of the doubt and I thought that surely anything would be better than Entourage.

The verdict? Well, it’s better in some ways and worse in others. Here’s the gripe list:

I cannot subscribe to any calendar other than my own. In organizations running Exchange, there are typically shared calendars that many users can read and write from – this is useful in things like event planning, team rota and so forth. I can’t access these at all from iCal.

iCal receives the click to highlight the window, and creates an event for me from that click, which I never intend – thus I waste time deleting the event.

All my events are the same colour. Yes, I can have multiple calendars and thus multiple colours, but as I said above I can only subscribe to my own calendar. Previously I would make things different colours so I could easily tell which meetings were regular recurrences that I’d booked versus stuff that my manager invited me to, versus stuff that someone not on my team invited me to, etc.

I can’t send any kind of message when I decline an event. This means I need to fire off an additional e-mail to say “Sorry, could you move this event forward an hour” or whatever. I also can’t accept or decline an event with sending a notification to the organizer (or the attendees when I’m the organizer). Not a big pain, until you discover that you also cannot cancel an edit. Yes, that’s right, if you edit an event and then decide that you don’t want to keep your changes – TOUGH LUCK! If you press Escape to close the editing window it asks you whether you want to send or go back to editing – no option to just throw away the edits! This was especially annoying when I made a change to meeting with 60 invitees that I didn’t need to send.

Also, I cannot update the meeting without also updating every attendee. This is annoying when I want to invite people to book the slot in their calendar, and then build up an agenda over time – I now need to keep the agenda separately, and fire an update just at the last minute.

Finally, forwarding an iCal invite requires a right-click. There is no menu option or context menu button or keyboard shortcut – you must right-click on the event and select “Mail Event”.

In summary then: Mail is an improvement on Entourage, iCal still needs a lot of work to come close to Entourage and Entourage is still short of Outlook. I know, I just said that a Microsoft app is a better than an Apple one. It’s true.