Turn off annoying iCal invite replies

Many people have complained about Apple really ruining iCal. I won't go into the depths of that. A month after I moved to a new Mac, I discovered yet another thing that wasn't properly restored from my previous system - the plugin to disable automatic replies to invitations.

iCal.app automatically sends and Accepted or Rejected email for calendar invitations. I want control over this notification, but there is none.

Enter John Maisey's extremely useful iCal Reply Checker. It took me a while to search for this utility - it is hidden in a deep corner of the web. Anyway, I am delighted that I found this utility again and installed it promptly!

iCal publish URLs lost after moving to a new Mac

I had a Mac disaster two weeks ago. To cut a long story short, Apple was nice enough to give me a new Unibody MacBook Pro when my older MBP died for the 4th time in one year. I am very vigilant about backups, and maintain a regular Time Machine backup.

The new Mac asked me to restore from an existing Time Machine backup, which I did. It took around 12 hours to restore from a 250GB backup.

One of the many things that did not get restored were my iCal publish URLs. Upon opening iCal, I noticed that my publish options had been reset to MobileMe. I had to dig through my old notes and find out what my original publish URLs were, since there is no easy way of digging that info out of my raw Time Machine backup.