Apple licensed the iCal name from Brown Bear Software, who have used it for their iCal application since 1997.[1]
iCal's initial development was quite different from other Apple software: it was designed independently by a small French team working "secretly" in Paris, led by Jean-Marie Hullot, a friend of Steve Jobs. iCal's development has since been transferred to Apple US headquarters in Cupertino.[2]
Features
Calendar tracks events and appointments, allows multiple calendar views (such as calendars for "home", "work", and other calendars that a user can create) to quickly identify conflicts and free time.[3] Users can subscribe to other calendars so they can keep up with friends and colleagues, and other things such as athletic schedules and television programs, as well as set notifications for upcoming events either in the Notification Center,[4] by email, SMS, or pager. Attachments and notes can be added to iCloud Calendar items.[5]
It is integrated with iCloud, so calendars can be shared and synced with other devices, such as other Macs, iPhones, iPads, iPod touch, and PCs over the internet. One can also share calendars via the WebDAV protocol. Google now supports WebDAV for Google Calendar making Calendar easily configurable.[6]
Calendar includes the ability to see travel time and weather at the event's location, with the ability to set an alarm based on the travel time.[7] Different time zones can be selected when entering and editing start and end times. This allows long-distance airplane flight times, for example, to be entered accurately and for that "end" of a visualized time "box" to render accurately on either iOS or macOS when time zone support is turned on in Calendar and the time zone set in Date/Time to the location in question.
Calendar support was added to CarPlay with iOS 13, allowing Siri to display and read out a user's upcoming events while driving.[8]
The app icon shows the device's current date when viewed from the home screen, making it one of the only iOS apps with a dynamic icon (the other being Clock).
Perl script and instructionsArchived September 30, 2011, at the Wayback Machine to subscribe from iCal to a Sun Calendar Server and subsequently sync it to mobile devices through iSync
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