by: George Starcher, Associate Editor

So I gave my wife my old G5 iMac a while back. I also installed BusySync. But does she look at the calendar? Nope. And you can imagine the look I get when I say “Well, it was on my Calendar.” And the response is “I won’t look in that.” So how to bring the information to her with the least amount of recurring effort on my part? Well, emailing it works since I know she reads that. Here is how you build an automator action to send a summary for the week for selected Calendars from iCal and have it run every Sunday night.

I was going to record this as audio for the show but then Victor told me how much Macworld  content video etc he has.  So I figure this is for those who read the blog.  A bonus if you will.We have to start with the Automator Action.

1. Open up Automator.
2. Drag over the “Find Calendars in iCal” action for EACH Calendar you want to send events for. I have work, home, medial appointmens all in their own calendars so I can view or hide them within iCal. In order for her to know all events for the week I have to make it so each.
3. Change the Find to :Events
4. Change the Whose to Start Date: next week
5. Press the + button under whose and add the Calendar is “xyz” where xyz is your calendar object to pull events from.
6. Stack these for every calendar you want to show in your email.
7. Drag over the “Event Summary ” action from the Calendar library underneath your stacked Finds. This will make a text summary of all the events.
8. Drag over “New Mail Message” from the Mail Library. Put in the recipient email and a nice subject like “Scheduled Events for Coming Week”
9. Lastly drag over “Send Outgoing Messages” from the Mail Library. This will send the email.

Ok so we have our automator. Now to save it so we can schedule it to run every Sunday night.

1. Over in iCal I would make a new Calendar like “Scheduled Automators” This is so we can have anything we schedule easy to find, delete or hide within iCal.
2. Come back to the Automator window, click File and choose “Save As Plugin”
3. Give it a suitable name like “Mail-WeeklySchedule”
4. Pull down the “Plug-in for” box and choose iCal alarm.
5. Go back to iCal and you will see a new event created on the current day. You will want to edit the event to set the desired time such as late Sunday night, to repeat every week and move it into the “Scheduled Automators” calendar.

That should do it. Now at that time every Sunday it will mail a summary for the coming week. Note if there are zero events the person will receive a blank email. Also if for some reason you need to add the alarm by hand choose “Open File” and the iCal Alarm plugins are saved by default in your user home folder/Library/Workflows/Applications/iCal location.Here is what my automator looks like.

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