After years of development and market competition, there have ended up being two primary calendars that people are using today: iCal for Apple fans (iPhones, Mac computers, etc) and Google Calendar for pretty much everyone else. Yeah, there are other calendar formats, but if you look online for sharable calendars, or those that you can subscribe to, you’ll find that they’re in one (or both) of those formats.
In terms of iCal itself, Apple actually has a section on its Web site that lists user-submitted calendars. How easy is that?
There are also lots of other calendars on a wide range of topics available directly from individual Web sites, calendars you can easily find with searches like “ical premier league soccer calendar” or, yes, “canadian holiday calendar ical”.
But let’s start with Apple’s iCal Web site.
To do that, go here: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/calendars/
By default, the page shows the latest calendars:
The search feature in this area is almost useless, unfortunately, because it searches the entire apple.com site for what you seek, not just the iCal calendars. Search for “canada” or “canadian” and there are all sorts of results. Not so useful.
You can instead search alphabetically by clicking on the appropriate tab on the page:
Of course, if you’d prefer, you can explore various search possibilities and some do give you good results, including this one:
Hey! There’s that Canadian Holiday calendar that we want.
Click on the link and you’ll see a Download link:
It’s 40K if you want to download it, but you don’t have to! In fact, click on the iCal calendar link and the browser will seek to launch iCal itself to share the link:
It’s good, nothing to worry about. Click on “Launch Application” and iCal opens up (launching, if needed), telling you what it’s about to do:
As you can see, it turns out that calendars have their own form of URL, starting with “webcal://”.
Click on “Subscribe” and it shows up in iCal letting you tweak and fine tune exactly what appears:
Notice you can pick which color to have these events appear (currently it’s set to green) along with the name of the calendar in your iCal system (in this case, the default is “CA Holidays”). A big one to check is “Auto-refresh”: If the calendar updates on the server, it’ll automatically update on your iCal system too. Neat, eh?
So that’s the scoop. Hope that helps you track all of your Canadian holidays!
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