Tip: Manage Birthdays with Address Book and iCal

Here's a tip (just in case you didn't know it yet).

If you're like me, you rely on an electronic calendar to remember people's birthdays. I've been doing this ever since I got my first PDA, I enter birthdays as yearly repeating events. This has worked well for me, but it's hardly efficient when I try to look up a specific person's birthday. What I mean to say is, if I think of a person and try to look up his/her birthday, I'd have to do a calendar search. Obviously, it's easier and better if I look up the person instead.

Well. Address Book and iCal offer an easy way to manage people's birthdays. You can actually enter someone's birthday into his/her Address Book card and have it appear in iCal as an event.




First, you have to add the birthday field into the Address Book template. You can easily do this in Address Book preferences.




After that, in iCal's preferences, place a check mark on the Show Birthdays calendar option.




iCal will automatically add a calendar named Birthdays, which uses Address Book as a source. The events are read-only, so you'll have to enter the birthdays in Address Book exclusively.




I've known about this feature for quite a while now, but it was today that I decided to migrate the birthdays from iCal into Address Book. To my surprise, it was easy, and it didn't take long for me to complete the task.

With iCal and Address Book open side-by-side, I looked to the calendar for birthdays of people I previously entered and then used the lightning quick Spotlight in Address Book to locate people and enter their natal information. Entering dates couldn't be any easier as Address Book will accept any date format (alphanumeric) as long as it's in the date-month-year order (i.e. 01 01 99, jan 1 1999, etc). If you don't enter a year, it'll enter the current year (there's no way to leave the year blank). That's okay with me though since I know none of these people were born this year anyway.

The best part is that this all syncs with my Treo 650. So I get to see birthdays in my Calendar or look up birthdays in my Contacts list.

Enjoy!

 

First you have to make sure you are using iSync, instead of Palm Desktop. In iSync, under Devices, select Enable Palm OS Syncing... Then go to Palm's conduit manager (launch Palm Desktop) and make sure that the iSync conduit is switched on.

I used Apple's Address Book to input all birthdays as stated in the first post in this thread. From there, it goes to iCal, as long as you set it to show using iCal's preferences. Then set iSync to include the birthday calendar, if you haven't set it to sync all calendars.

Although I use MissingSync, the process is the same as in iSync.

 

It works on my Treo 680 (as it did with my 650). Maybe it's because I use Missing Sync.

 

The instructions I gave are for your computer. The ability to sync the data with a mobile device is merely a bonus.

If you follow the instructions listed in the first post of this thread, you'd get the birthdays entered in the Mac's Address Book.app to show up as iCal entires. From there, you can use iSync (and not Palm Desktop) to get iCal to sync with your Palm's Calendar application. What I'm not sure of is if birthday entries in the Mac's Address Book database will sync with the Palm's Contacts application.

In my case, it does and I think it's because I use MissingSync. Neither PalmDesktop nor HotSync figures in any of this as a solution.

I guess that's the way the N80 treats untimed events, or it just doesn't know how else to handle them.