Jobs: New iCal app intro'd

Apple CEO Steve Jobs introduced a new i-application, iCal, today in his keynote at Macworld Conference & Expo in New York. Thet program has built-in Internet sharing that lets you manage multiple calendars, share them over the Internet, and automatically keep them updated.

“If you use your Mac for calendaring, this is a Godsend,” Jobs said. “It’s the first calendaring application created post-Internet.”

You can “publish” your iCal calendars on the Web, so others can “subscribe” and view them in iCal on their own Mac. In addition, iCal can automatically check for updates to imported calendars on a regular basis, so shared calendars are always up to date. With iCal, you can:

Keep track of schedules, appointments and tasks, viewing activities by day, week or month;

Manage and view multiple calendars at once from within one unified window to identify schedule conflicts or free time at-a-glance;

Publish calendars on the Web to share with colleagues, family and friends;

Subscribe to other calendars to keep up with work schedules, family events, school events and more;

Send standards-based e-mail event invitations;

Organize and keep track of activities with built-in To Do list management;

Be notified of upcoming events on screen, by email or text messaging to a mobile phone or pager;

Quickly find any event, task or name entered into iCal using its lightning-fast search tool.

In addition, Apple’s new iSync lets you sync your iCal calendars with the new generation of Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones, PalmOS devices and the iPod for access to their most current address books and calendars on the go.

iCal will be available as a free download this September and requires Mac OS X version 10.2 (“Jaguar”). Publishing calendars on the Internet requires a .Mac membership or a WebDAV server. You can host your iCal calendar on the new .Mac service.