QuickCal 1.7

QuickCal is a very nice Mac OS X widget that plays nice with iCal. It allows you to add new events to iCal without having to open iCal at all.

This app installs itself as a widget, so you have to open the Mac OS X dashboard to access it. This provides a great way of adding events no matter what you are doing on your Mac.

Unlike other widgets or apps where you have to manually select the dates, the type of the event, set a location, etc, QuickCal uses text-recognition to do all the hard work for you. So, basically, if you want to add an event to remind you that you have to pick up your friend Steve at his house at 2pm and you want that event to last for a full 2 minutes, you can simply type this in the QuickCal window: Pickup Steve at his house at 2pm for 2 minutes. The app will automatically detect all the key parts of that sentence and create the event for you.

If you click the "i" button on the widget, you will access the reminder options. Here you can set global options for all your events. The only thing missing is an option to disable all reminders, like some users have been requesting on QuickCal's website.