There is one use case which Mail.app 3 and the various other applications I’m using to sort out my To Do lists simply does not provide for yet - recurring To Dos. For a short time I made use of  Sciral Consistency unfortunately while it’s a great application, I feel quite bad for spending quite that much on something that I’ve already put a fair amount of time into in the past (see my post Planning recurring To Do's via iCal itself).

So at the weekend I decided to bring back my old AppleScript, sort out the few issues that remained, and re-release it. After around an hour of attempting to get date creation working with AppleScript (yes, really, an hour, to make a date...) I decided to give it another try in another language I enjoy using - Ruby. Two hours of using ScriptingBridge passed and I was still unable to make a To Do list item. Almost ready to give up I took a look at the new CalendarStore framework in Leopard, and figured I might as well give Objective C 2.0 and XCode 3 a shot as I’d never before tried these latest incarnations.

An hour later and the application was complete... using CalendarStore all of the manual handling of recurrence disappears and is replaced with a trivial query for todays events. Creating To Do items is well documented, so that was also trivial to get working.

The project source can be found via my github project here: http://github.com/zinf/icaltodoscheduler/tree/master.

UPDATE - I’ve uploaded a zip of the application for anyone that doesn’t have git - iCalTodoScheduler.zip. Warranty-less and free to use. You’ll need a calender “@inbox” and a calendar “Shadow”. See my earlier post for a description of creating the Shadow calendar.