I have been using the Mozilla Calendar plugin for firefox to manage appointments tasks etc for quite a while. Used in conjunction with a batch file and an online iCal web page it has been pretty easy for me to keep my family and friends up to date on events in my life.
However, as nice as that combo has been I have wanted something even cleaner. I haven’t found the perfect solution yet but I think I’m getting there. Today I downloaded the latest version of Rainlender (windows only sorry) and it supports iCal files as well (iCal is the standard format of Mozilla Calendar and many other calendaring apps - it’s a great standard!). Anyway, Rainlender gives me even faster access to my events because it resides on the desktop as a lightweight widget. Plus it takes care of another problem - it provides a “task list” feature. I can point Rainlender at my iCal files, denote some as read only, and I’m off and running. Then using GeoShell (my shell replacement) and a hot key sequence that fires my batch file I can instantly publish any changes to my calendar.
Pretty darn handy!