Is there a way to enter multiple birthdays to iCal from one Address Book contact? I want to list birthdays for every family member in Address Book, without having ot create a new contact for each--I don't really want to add my friend's spouse and kids as contacts but would like to keep track of their birthdays.

The versions of iCal in Leopard and Snow Leopard each have a built-in Birthdays calendar that you can turn on in iCal > Preferences > General. This calendar pulls data from the Birthdays field in your Address Book cards.

iCal will only grab birthday data from Address Book, but Dates to iCal will sync anniversary dates too (which you can relabel to whatever you want, including other birthdays).

If the Birthdays field isn’t already showing up on your Address Book cards, go to Address Book > Preferences > Template, and use the Add Field dropdown to add a Birthdays field to all your cards. Currently, each contact can only have one birthday, but you can also add other Date fields, namely Anniversary. When you’re adding that info to an individual contact’s card, click the plus sign next to the Anniversary field to create more date fields, then relabel them to whatever you want--say, Spouse’s Birthday, Child’s Birthday, or, even better, use the family member’s actual name.

That puts an entire family’s birthdays on one Address Book card, but iCal won’t sync those other dates to the Birthdays calendar. To do that, you need a shareware app called Dates to iCal 2 (£3, about $4.89 at press time, www.nhoj.co.uk/datestoical). It lets you choose which dates in your Address Book cards are synced to iCal, how the iCal events are labeled, what alarms are triggered, and more.