Automatic birthday reminders from Address Book to iCal

   With Mac OS X Tiger (10.4), Apple introduced a new feature in iCal: the ability to generate a calendar from the birthdays that you added in Address Book. Find out more at http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?path=iCal/2.0/en/wr70.html

   However I was disappointed that one cannot set an alarm on the events in the Birthdays calendar. So I created a hack to fix that. It is not simple but it works and it is completely automatic. First you need to download the script source here. Open the script with the AppleScript Editor. You can then change the following parameters:

  • calendar_title: the title of the calendar to which the events should be added
  • before_name: appended before the person's name in the event title
  • after_name: appended after the person's name in the event title
  • alarm_days: which day the alarm should start
  • alarm_hours: which hour the alarm should start
  • alarm_minutes: which minute the alarm should start
  • sound_name: the name of the sound used for the alarm

   To test the script, click on the 'Compile' button and then the 'Run' button. Once you are satisfied with the script behavior, save it somewhere as a .scpt file.

   Finally to run the script regularly, you can create a recurring event in iCal with an alarm to run the script automatically:

iCal_screenshot.png

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