Aggregating iCal alarms

September 22, 2005 1:35 PM

I want to send a weekly e-mail reminder to myself that shows my appointments for the upcoming week. How the heck so I do this with iCal on OSX?

I can create e-mail alarms for *individual* events in iCal, but is there a way to aggregate these into a single weekly e-mail? I imagine someone, somewhere, has to have figured out a way to accomplish this, but my Google-fu is failing me.

I'm new to OSX and have never written Applescript, but I'd be willing to learn if it meant I could create my weekly reminder e-mail.

posted by sanitycheck to Computers & Internet (3 answers total)

If you have Tiger, you could try using Automator -- I just checked the Actions list, and it looks like the right combination would do what you want. Then you just need to schedule the event to run every week -- Cronnix should help with that.
posted by tweebiscuit at 1:47 PM on September 22, 2005

sanitycheck, I've written a simple Automator workflow for you that creates a weekly summary and mails it to the e-mail address specified in the Address book for the current user. To try it out, perform the following steps:

1. Download the Zip file containing my sample Automator workflow.
2. Double-click it to extract the workflow from the Zip file.
3. Open the workflow to see how it works.
4. Click the Run button in the upper right-hand corner to execute the workflow.
5. A summary e-mail should be sent to the e-mail address for the current user.

iCal itself can be used to schedule the Automator workflow to run once a week, no need to use an additional application like tweebiscuit suggested. To do so, perform the following steps:

1. Save the Automator workflow as an application.
2. Create a weekly repeating event for early Monday.
3. For the repeating event, specify that it has has an "Open File: Other" alarm, and choose the workflow application as the file.

posted by RichardP at 4:12 PM on September 22, 2005

As an additional example, I've uploaded a version of the workflow that uses no AppleScript, it strictly relies on built-in Automator actions. You may find it somewhat easier to understand and modify. Before using this version you'll have to modify the "New Mail Message" action to specify your e-mail address in the "To:" field.
posted by RichardP at 4:35 PM on September 22, 2005