In the current issue of Macworld Tom Ballen spied an iCal feature he hadn’t seen before. He writes:
I notice in the first portion of the Geek Factor January article, “Color Your Calendars,” that you have seven calendars subordinated under School. How does one do that in iCal? That is, make one or more calendars subordinate to one, such as School?
What you’ve witnessed is iCal’s Group Calendar feature (found in the Tiger version of iCal). To employ it, open iCal and choose File -> New Calendar Group. As requested, a new group entry appears in iCal’s Calendars list. You can then organize your calendars by dragging them into this group. For example, put all your kids’ calendars here or collections of sports teams’ schedules.
This group calendar feature offers a couple of advantages. The first is that you can easily reveal or hide all the calendars within a group simply by checking or unchecking the box next to the name of the group. The second is that you can publish a group as a single calendar to your .Mac account or a WebDAV server. This solves the age-old iCal problem of being able to generate a web-based calendar that included the events from a single calendar only.