iCal, gripes and groans

I had a 'holy crap, I'm dead moment' this morning.

I was in a rush to get out the door after sending out an agenda and iCal was crashing every time I tried to start it. Off to the web for instant support where the forum entry on macosxhints, iCal crashes on startup was all I needed to get back in action. I left 10 minutes later than I'd planned and wound up in a snarl because of a motorcycle accident in Simi.

Before I start slamming iCal, I should mention that there are a lot of things I like. It looks beautiful. It imports vCal data very nicely. Day long event items and perpetual meetings are very easy to add.

On the other hand, where's the validation?

I'd done no vCal imports in the last week or so, leaving it to iCal to have created the munged data in such a way that it could no longer deal with it. In effect, it ate a big chunk of my calendar and developed severe indigestion. Once I'd removed it from the gut, I was able to feed it back in and have the calendar digest it properly. This isn't how Mac applications are supposed to behave. Do the right thing, tell me before I'm in trouble. I suppose the recovery process is mostly automatic, so why not have the app do the right thing and try importing?

I have two bigger gripes while I'm at it.

For years, it's been easy to add repeating todo items to popular Mac calendars. Best of luck with iCal. I used a script. Why can't I add a repeating todo if I can have a repeating event?

And my favorite. What the hell were they thinking when they created the iCal alarm notification UI? If the application is running, any action (and in some cases no action) causes the iCal application to surface from behind where I banished it. The only solution is to quit the damned thing so I don't have to see it popping up all the time. It's also a mouse biased nightmare. Did they ever look at Palm Desktop (based on Claris Organizer, an application once sold by Apple... I'm betting not)? The solution implemented by Palm (perhaps Claris before them, it's been too long) was a dialog (similar to that used by Apple) that allowed keyboard input. I'll acknowledge that Apple has done a better job on the focus issue, but keyboard ain't in the vocabulary. I just want to be able to type 11 and enter, to delay the alarm by eleven minutes the first time it comes up. Enter or return to dismiss it entirely. A three minute delay? Umm, sorry, not in our popup. And the way it keeps track of time? I select repeat in one minute at xx:51 and some seconds and it's back at xx:53. Where did you learn to add?

To say the alarm notification sucks is to be too kind.