Here’s a quick and really neat trick for Mac users who would like to have birthdays listed in iCal. As default, your Mac will easily display birthdays in iCal, based on dates from your Addressbook, but it can’t give you an alarm and there’s no way to modify the events to do so.
So, somebody created an Automator workflow/application that will add your contact’s birthdays to iCal with an alarm you define, e.g. when to sound an alarm (2 days prior, etc.) or whatever you want it to do.
It’s freeware and you can download it here, from Apple Downloads, then just run it through Automator and it’s pretty self explanatory.
I always forget the birthdays of my friends. It will definitely help people like me.
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Thanks Ricky – but I thought you were a Windows user? 🙂
What a useful extension.
I am always really bad about dates and to be honest, I am not very likely to check my calendar unless I have an alarm set or know I added some stuff to it in the last week or two. So, having JUST birthdays in my calendar is pretty useless to me.
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this application helps me a lot to be updated my regular day to day. It hard to maintain the task list in dairy.
Thanks a lot for sharing this information.
What a nice little iCal tweak. Setting reminders with alarms are great, as there is no greater faux pass than forgetting somebody’s birthday, especially when it is a feisty family member or even worse, client.
Now I wonder if you can set different alarms with different levels of “seriousness” to indicate how urgently you should be attending to the alarm? All the same sounding beeps soon gets lost in the clutter too, and heaven forbid you forget the wife’s birthday, or your anniversary 😉
I ran it thru Automator as directed, but I’m confused. Does Automator have to be kept running? What will prompt the reminders to pop up? I don’t know what to do next. Thanks.
Hi Rick, I wish I could remember exactly how to do it, but I don’t 🙁 However, I’ve set up an iCal event to run monthly and in the event you can tell it to run an Automator program, so it only starts up once a month and Automator close again by itself (iCal doesn’t, though).
What a useful extension.
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