A Month with a Mac: A Die-Hard PC User's Perspective

iCalendar

The one thing that I missed from Outlook was the integration between the email, calendar and address book applications. While light levels of integration are present in Mail (such as being tied in to the Address Book), you have to launch iCalendar separately in order to get calendar functionality. For some reason, I've never been able to really get much use out of iCalendar because it's not tied into Mail, whereas I used Outlook's calendar quite a bit. There's something about having a separate window to deal with just for the calendar that doesn't mix well with me.

All uncomfortable feelings aside, iCal is a pretty well-rounded calendar program. It covers all of the bases including a to-do list, the ability to create multiple calendars, reminders for scheduled events, recurring events and once again, just about everything else that you can do in Outlook.

Maybe it's because of my lack of use of the application, but I haven't been able to find anything that stands out about iCal by which I was truly impressed. Mail had its speed and I guess iCal has its stylistic beauty, but other than that, I wasn't too floored by the application. That's not to say that it isn't good; it's a fine application, just nothing to write home about in my opinion. It does the job that Outlook did, which is all that matters in the end.

For those of you who are like me and want more integration between the applications, there is always Microsoft Entourage (basically Outlook for OS X). I honestly haven't played around with Entourage much, mostly because of the issues that I've had with Office for the Mac (which I'll cover later) and because I'm so happy with Mail.