Normally iCal has only the ability to open one window, this is usually fine for most normal use. But every so often you may want a second window to spice things up, or to help you with your day to day iCal eventing. To this little trick is simple. It only involves my favourite thing on a Mac, the Terminal command line.

Open up Terminal and copy and paste the following. This will set a small debug menu item into your menu where a magic shortcut will appear.

defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu 1

Once as you have hit enter restart iCal or open it up. You should then have a debug meny next to help. Within the menu there should be an option which says “New Calendar Window”. When you hit that button a second window will pop open.

Both windows will be kept sync’d up, which is another bonus feature. If you want to remove the little hack type the previous command again but replace the “1″ with a “0″ and you are all set.

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The world is big, very big. As a result we have to split the worlds time up into 24 segments to make it more manageable. This can be a problem, especially if you have to find out when appointments around the world are starting in relation to your time zones, and example being Steve Job’s Macworld speech. The solution to this is to use timezone support in iCal to take the work out of working out what the time is.

The method is really easy and only involves a few steps. If you go to the preferences within iCal. Then go to the advance section there is a check box the says “Turn on time zone support”. Check this box. This button works all of the magic out. I also recommend changing the amount of hours shown in the general section to around 15.

This then enables a special drop down box within the top right hand corner of the window. This will display your current time zone. By clicking on the area you should see a list with only one item, your current time zone (I have two because I have already set this up). You then need to add more, click the other menu item to get up the GUI for picking your time zone.

Once as you get the interface up, you need to click on the area with the time zone you want to use. For example if you want east coast America you click on the east coast of America. You can then use the drop down box to refine the selection to a city or area you know of.

Working out what time it is in any zone is easy from this point on. You make a note of the current time in your zone, by either a calender entry or the current time by the use of the line that goes across the page. You then change the selection in the top left for the zone you want to work it out in. You will then be presented with what time it is. For example at the moment it is 16:30 in London, by changing the time in the top right I know it is 12:30 in New York.

You can at this point proceed to add as many time zones as you want. Add all 24 if you feel bored. The only problem is I haven’t yet found out how to delete them. So if you add all of them you might be in a bit of trouble if you want to save space. The only way I can think of is to delete you cache file. Please leave a comment if you know how.

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