I generate a family calendar each year to track birthdays, anniversaries, and other recurring events. Every year, I update it manually to include ages, lengths of marriages, and so on. As you can imagine, it is a pretty tedious process. Is there a script or application that can recalculate these numbers each year and bring them into iCal?
What you are describing is a lot of work that could potentially be automated by a script. But the easiest solution is already built into Address Book and iCal.
Click on the birthday drop-down menu to create a custom label for this field.
To begin, open Address Book and create “fake” contacts for the different situations by inputting the descriptor in the first or last name fields (“Someone’s Anniversary” for example). To add the year, click on Card > Add Field > Birthday, and add the start date for this event.
Over in iCal navigate to iCal > Preferences > General, and check the Show Birthdays calendar box. The events will show up on your calendar as “Someone’s Anniversary 1st Birthday.” This will update (count up) every year automatically. Unfortunately, iCal will think it’s everybody’s birthday, but that’s a minor inconvenience compared to manually updating the calendar listings every year.
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