Lucas Chan :: Weblog

Karl bought a MacBook recently. He asked me if there was a way to quickly add events/appointments into Quicksilver. He gets lots of emails with dates for gigs and wants to be able to quickly add them to his calendar without manually adding them in iCal.

So the idea is that you should be able to copy any semi-sanely formatted date/time and quickly add it to the iCal calendar of your choice and provide an event title.

There are some instructions around, but they’re a little incomplete. They omit the first step which I’m posting here for googlers. Here it is:

Enable iCal Plugin

1. Invoke Quicksilver, go to Preferences.
2. Check “Enable advanced features” an relaunch Quicksilver when prompted.
3. Invoke Quicksilver, go to Preferences -> Plugins. Click “All Plug-ins” on the left, select “Calendar”, then check the “iCal Module”.
4. Optional Step. After enabling this plugin I was able to disable advanced features and the plugin seemed to remain active.

Now we have the ability to use iCal actions. Sweet. Onto the good stuff.

Creating a New iCal Event

1. Invoke Quicksilver
2. Type “.” to invoke text mode.
3. Type “[date] — [ event_name ]“. e.g:

   Next Friday 1PM -- Beer!

   Note that the double-dash (--) is really important here.

4. Use the “Create iCal Event” action. (i.e. Hit [tab] to go to the “action” field - then type “event”).
5. Select the Calendar you want to add the event to. (again, hit [tab] to get to this field).

Creating a New iCal To Do

Exactly the same process as above, but choose the “Create iCal To Do” action.

Date Formats

According to the Quicksilver docs for the iCal plugin, the date can be in the following formats:

2/4/07 3pm	(default format)
2007-02-04	(note long year number)
feb 4	(english month names are understood)
friday 12pm	(english day names are ok)
next wednesday 13:00	(use next because today is wednesday)
15.2.07	(feb 15th 2007, cause 15 can’t be a month)
3.2.07	(march 2nd 2007!!)

This entry was posted on Friday, June 8th, 2007 at 2:36 pm and is filed under Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.