Of course, if you are fine with locations in the event name or without locations at all, then this isn’t a problem. If you were able to include the location in the Quick Add, Quick Add would actually provide a great overall solution for adding new events, but now you need to add the location separately, which kind of defeats the purpose. For instance, if you typed there “Party at Anand’s Place on Friday at 9pm”, it will create an event for that date but the name of the event will be “Party at Anand’s Place”, not “Party” and “Anand’s Place” as the location. The biggest shortcoming of Quick Add is that the location must be entered separately, there is no way to “Quick Add” it. Quick Add is a similar feature to what things like QuickCal and Google Calendar provide, so some users may already be familiar with the concept. Once you add the event, you will be provided with the regular event editor which lets you set the location, repeat, alert and so on. Another example could be “Dinner with Anand on 20 th of June 4pm-5pm”. Of course, you can also use regular dates and set the duration. For example, “Lunch with Anand on Friday at 1pm” would create an event on the following Friday at 1pm with the header “Lunch with Anand”. Probably the most interesting feature of the new iCal is Quick Add: you no longer have to set everything separately, you can just type it. The Day view is actually present in Snow Leopard as well, but Lion takes it one step further by adding a running list of events instead of just a view of your day’s schedule, so this isn’t a totally new feature. On the right-hand-side, you have all the events for the selected day, which explains the Day view name of the tab. On the left-hand side, you have a regular calendar with dates and below it you have a list of your upcoming events. The first new feature is Day view, which is exactly the same as on the iPad. The redesign isn’t the only new thing, as Lion’s iCal has some new features as well, although they are more or less copied from iPad. On the right-hand-side you can have a Reminders column which will be useful once iOS 5 becomes available.
The column used to hold your calendars but they are now under a dedicated “Calendars” button. Overall the look is simpler and cleaner compared to old iCal but the left-hand-side column is now totally gone which may affect the usability of iCal if you have multiple calendars. The most dramatic change occurs right when you open iCal - the toolbar is now beige leather-ish instead of the old iCal’s regular grey toolbar theme, apparently inspired by the increasingly obsolete personal organizer. As you might have guessed, the new look is yet again inspired by iPad’s Calendar app. ICal is OS X’s calendar application and it sports a new look in Lion.