Slick, slick, slickity slick.

For four years at college, and for the four years before that in high school, I loved carrying a small paper planner around with me. I scribbled down homework assignments, highlighted tests and important meetings, and would draw colored bars across the bottoms of vacation days.

There was a lot of satisfaction gotten in the ability to arbitrarily vary the size of my writing (and the number of times I wrote over the text) depending on how important things were, and having everything literally at my fingertips - I pulled the planner out, flipped it open, and everything I needed to know about the day was there. (I carried my computer around with me all the time, too, but it was typically a bit more of a hassle to open it and open the right application while talking to a friend in the middle of a crowded hallway.)

So I told myself that I’d never turn away from paper, that I’d be true to my roots (pretend that makes sense) and stick with the low-fi solution. Google Calendar never really appealed to me anyway (BIG SECRET: I really hate web apps sometimes), and I couldn’t handle having my calendar isolated inside a desktop application.

Then CalDAV support came to Google Calendar. And I got an iPhone (finally). And I graduated from school (double finally).

Can I just say - I used iCal to schedule seventy bazillion things in a six-week period during September and October last fall, and it was the easiest thing ever? And now that I can sync my calendar back to Google, and have it synced to my personal laptop, work laptop, and phone, and no longer spend lots of time with pen+paper… I think iCal has changed my life. [side note, if it wasn’t already obvious: I’m a little OCD when it comes to evening / weekend plans / etc. But you all love me anyway.]

And the iCal interface is just so damn slick. None of this am-I-clicking-on-the-event-title-or-the-event-blob-to-move-the-time, no latency, no sorry-we-can’t-reach-the-server. I kind of wish double-clicking on an event would always allow me to edit right away, but in the same way I am lame enough to designate a taxi application my Favorite iPhone App Ever, I think iCal is coming very close to being one of my Favorite Mac Apps Ever. (But never the top - that honor will always be to Quicksilver.)

So in the end, that’s all this post is - an rhapsody over a Cocoa application. Yum.

Let me know what you think on Twitter.