YABI: iCal birthday and anniversary alarms done right
Mac OS X 10.4 Tiger's iCal introduced a 'Show Birthdays calendar' option which automatically adds an all-day event for any contacts who have birthdays listed in Address Book. It's smart, but it isn't very flexible - there is no option for alarms and no way to add extra information like age or details of an impending party. Enter YABI: yet Another Birthday Importer, which aims to bring power and flexibility to the way iCal imports birthday events, as well as anniversaries (scroll down a little on the page). Tim Gaden at Hawk Wings has a nice writeup of key features, but to summarize, YABI can:
display a person's age in the event title
add events to the calendar of your choice
set a configurable alarm
chose exactly which contacts to import events for
decide how many years to repeat the events
and more
YABI strikes me as another one of those 'shoulda been in Tiger' apps, as it fills so many holes left by iCal's paltry implementation of this feature. Fortunately, it's a Universal Binary and free at least while in beta.