RejectReality

I was posed with an interesting problem today; to come up with a way to quickly add and display outstanding iCal to-do items.

An hour later, a little AppleScript was born that grabs all your outstanding to-do items and displays them, separated by which calendar they exist in and displays the due date, if entered. Even better, they disappear from the notification list when you mark an item as completed in iCal.

It requires Growl, a general purpose notification utility, to be installed to display the to-do items. It also works best when invoked by using a global hotkey to execute the script on demand. I use Quicksilver, an application launcher, for the latter part; I’m sure there are alternatives that will function just as well.

Aside from having Growl installed and running, you don’t need any special configuration to use it with this script.

Details for how to set up a Quicksilver keyboard trigger to invoke this script can be found in the Quicksilver documentation.

Pick up a copy of the ready-to-run script here:
growl-todo-items.scpt.

Feel free to open it in Script Editor to have a look (and most likely a giggle if you’re a serious Mac developer ) at the script.

When you run the script, here’s what it looks like:

Pretty neat, eh?

If you use it, like it, hate it, have problems with it have mangled it into something else cool, make sure you drop a comment below or send me an email to let me know!

PS - If you install Quicksilver with the iCal plugin to run this script, you can also use it to quickly add todo’s into iCal too!