MacNoob

I sorted through an iCal problem the other day and I thought I’d share it with everyone.  I, like many others subscribe to a couple of calendars in iCal on my Macs, namely U.S. Holidays and the Houston Astros schedule.  The problem is, if you sync calendars via Mobile Me, calendars you subscribe to can’t be published and won’t sync to an iPhone or iPod Touch.  There is a way to work around this and it’s fairly simple.  The only tools you’ll need come with your Mac.  Here’s what you do:

1. In the iCal menu select <Calendar><Find Shared Calendars…>.  This will launch your browser and take you to published iCal calendars on Apple’s download website.
2. Find a calendar you want and right-click (control-click) its’ “Download” button and select “Copy Link”.
3. Paste the link into a new browser window’s address bar but DO NOT PRESS ENTER.
4. The URL should look something like: webcal://ical.mac.com/ical/…
5. Change “webcal” to “http” and hit Enter.
6. If you did everything right, what will be displayed is the content of the .ics file that iCal understands.
7. In your browser menu, select <File><Save> from the menu and save the file to your desktop.  Safari and Firefox will both append a “.txt” to the filename so it looks something like this: “USHolidays.ics.txt”
8. Rename the file removing the “.txt” portion.
9. In the iCal menu select <File><Import…> and select the file you just renamed and iCal will ask you which of your calendars you’d like to import the new file to. (or you can create an new calendar for the new events beforehand)
10. Select one of your calendars and click “Continue”.
11. That’s it!  The new events will show up in the calendar you specified.

If the calendar you specified is one you publish to Mobile Me, the new events will be published also and will be synchronized across all your Mobile Me machines and devices.

 Email This Post