iCal script to export events to Devonthink richtext or sheet

I posted this to the Development forum and am new to these forums. I am sorry that I don’t know how to cross list so will ask, hat in hand, here as well.

I love my mac, I am developing a deep respect for Devonthink.

I hate iCal. Just really hate it.

I imported about 15 years of Palm desktop calender and it is not pretty. There is no way to archive events. You would think you could export all of one year, for instance, and open that year as a separate database. But Noooooo.

I have heard about Bento and that will import iCal events into their database. But is there anyway to import iCal into Devonthink the way that you can import and archive email. I know they are different critters. God knows what iCal has become with all this sync business.

Currently there is no way to archive or analyze calenders. It is just dumb. iCal is crippled. It would be a blessing and boon for there to be a script that would take this data and export it to Devonthink.

One does not need a dynamic calender for years past. It is over and done with. One wants to get statistics and information. Both are things that iCal has no provision for. These are things that professionals need to use everyday and I think would be an important selling point for Devonthink’s efforts to be “paperless office central.”

What I do need is to find all occurrences of an event, the dates, the time spent, etc. If it is in the form of a list or in cute calender form with colored squares it matters not.

It would be absolute magic for there to be a script that built a rich text file of all calender events with the information attached. For instance on 5/4/2001 I would have seen Mr. Smith for a 1 hour consultation.

It would, as I am thinking, be best as a long list of events separated by a hard return in a rich text file.

1/2/99 2pm-3pm Mr. Smith consultation<>
1/2/99 3pm -6pm Deposition <>
Etc. all the way to whatever date was specified. Once this data was pulled out of an iCal calender it could all be deleted, or not. But the data would be there for Devonthink to use.

At best Devonthink would have a sheet that looked like a calender and you could choose day, week, or month views. But you get my drift. And a great start would be a plain rich text file of all calender events according to start and stop dates.

I want to unload my 15 years of iCal events into Devonthink. I want to lighten the size of my calender because it serves to purpose to carry those many years on a Palm device. I have solved the problem of long sync times by using Mark/Space Missing Sync which is a marvel for those of us who have suffered with HotSync from Palm and can’t figure out what in the hell Apples iSync is really doing.

Thank you for thinking this through with me. You guys rightly anticipated that email needs to be archived and ready for Devonthink processing/access. There should be some solution for calender data as well. Time is money for those of us who have only time to sell.

Bruce