I am finding the changes to iCal and the address book a bit startling, though. The leather graphic is cheesy and reminds me of wood laminate. Anti-quality. Using a book metaphor where there is one entry per page feels like a waste of space, even though I know it's not--but that's the cost of evoking that visual in that way.

I am pretty sure it is not MODS, Tom (but I do know what MODS is, go team me!). I am pretty sure it is "we made it up in 1992." What I have access to is huge .txt files, with hundreds of entries that look like this (replace () with pointy brackets mentally):

(au)von Koppenfels, Werner(/au)
(ti)KATASKOPOS oder der Blick von der Hohe: Ein menippeischer Streifzug(/ti)
(jl)A&A 47(/jl) [Yes, all the journal titles are abbreviated, but find and replace could fix this I guess.]
(yr)2001(/yr)
(pg)1-20(/pg)

Ugh, and now that I pasted that I notice they've put the journal volume number and the title in the same field, and they should be different fields, so that is another problem.

ita,

I do not use ical if I can absolutely fucking help it. I use google calendar and Quickcal.

Note: google calendar uglified their page really something awful, so I find I mostly look at my calendar on my iphone/ipad these days. Using Agenda.

I can't rely on being logged into a given google account on a given browser--the Google account I use for scheduling isn't one of the three or four I use for email, and each browser (Opera, Chrome, etc) is logged into one of those, or deliberately not logged into Google at all.

If there's a standalone app that synchronises with a Google calendar, equivalent to iCal, that runs on OS X, I'd gladly look at it. I'm also not necessarily going to want to use one of my mobile devices. I mean, sometimes I want the advantage of a full form factor, you know?

right.

I think a lot of people like busycal.

I also use Quickcal just to enter appointments. It is the bomb diggity. I can do it with quick keystrokes.

If there's a standalone app that synchronises with a Google calendar, equivalent to iCal, that runs on OS X

Sunbird? I like it on Windows at least. Kind of ugly, but in a more utilitarian way than iCal. If you use Thunderbird, you can use the Lightning extension with it (same thing as Sunbird, just as an extension of Thunderbird).

Speaking of calendars...

Is there a way to get other people's google calendars, that have been shared with me, to appear on the iPhone calendar apps? Right now, the only way I can see them is by using Google's own web-based iOS "app" (i.e. the mobile version of the web page).

Never mind. I googled the answer. If you go to google.com/calendar/iphoneselect you can pick which calendars to synch. I just added all the shared ones and am waiting for my phone to update to see if it worked.

I think there is Jon B, but there are about 3 ways to sync your iPhone calendar with Google, and some of them let you do it and some don't. I used the "Google Sync" method, I believe, which let you navigate to a web page from your iPhone and enable/disable different calendars. The default "gmail" account method, when last I tried it, had trouble with multiple calendars of any form, and shared calendars specifically. It may have improved?

I would strongly suggest investing in a calendar app that isn't the iPhone default. I really enjoyed CalenGoo for the 5 days I had it before I bought an Android (not the most worthwhile purchase perhaps...) but didn't play with it enough to really recommend it, per se. But Business Calendar on the Android has changed my life by being basically nothing like the default calendar app(s), just way better.

If CalenGoo is as good as I tended to think it was after a couple of days, I have to think that $6.99 is a cheap price to pay.