One feature of iCalMaker I use a lot, and so do our users judging by their comments, is the comma/tab import feature.

So, what is it? Well, imagine you have been sent a spreadsheet of dates/appointments and you want to get them in to iCal…. well, you could type them in one at a time, or you could export the data from the spreadsheet as a tab, or comma, delimited file (tab works best…) and then import it in to iCalMaker for export as an iCal file, or directly to iCal.

Two major requests from users are more choices on the import besides just start time, start date, end time, end date and summary, and more options over the format of dates and times (this is required for date/time analysis).

Well, the code for comma/tab data import has been significantly re-written. This has two advantages:

1. More options for import can now be easily added (so far there aren’t any new ones added, but this should now be trivial)
2. Time/date formats can now be set. The user can either have them set to the system default, or use their own format (this needs some work in the program preferences).

The new comma and tabbed data import window

In addition, it is now possible to step forward and backward through imported data to see if the selected ‘types’ match.

The data input order can be selected by using the pop-up menus in the import window…

Selecting the data-import type

and if the same data-type is selected more than once then the import cannot be run (note the ‘Import’ button is not available), and a warning is presented on the window….

Import for tab and comma-delimited data files has been tested, and all seems to work OK…. another thing done (tick), and another step closer to releasing the new version of iCalMaker2.

Work is progressing on iCalMaker2… one new big change has been to the ‘format’ of the program. This change was made fairly early on, and at the request of the users…

One thing that iCalMaker does quite well is ‘sort-out’ broken iCal files. By broken I mean ones in which entries have been ‘duplicated’ or ‘mixed’ in some way.

However, a number of users commented that once data was imported in to iCalMaker there was no way to save ‘work-in-progress’. Yes, the data could be exported as an iCal file and imported later, but the problem there was iCalMaker would not allow iCal files to be saved IF there was a problem with events ending before they started (long story – but this feature was added to prevent ‘invalid’ events being produced).

To get over the ‘saving’ problem it was decided to make iCalMaker2 a document based application. What that means is iCalMaker2 data can be saved as it is worked on as a document, and multiple iCalMaker2 documents can be open at a time….

All part of some the improvements and changes that are now possible as a result of moving iCalMaker over to objective C v2.0, Xcode 3 and core-data….