Apple takes the standard calendar application into new and useful territory with iCal, a tool that lets you view not only your own appointments, but also those of family members and coworkers, all from one convenient window. You can create multiple calendars for yourself (for home, work, or anything else) and subscribe to calendars that others publish online with a .Mac account or upload to a personal site. Each calendar gets its own color and displays in an overlapping format.

But the current product feels more like a beta than a final release. Although it is a big improvement over the crash-prone 1.0 debut version, iCal 1.0.2 has a long way to go before it will steal business from Palm Desktop or other full-featured calendar apps. For starters, iCal is seriously slow. It drags when opening or simply changing the view. And it would benefit from improvements in ease-of-use. You can't advance the calendar by individual days when using the week view, for example; you can advance by whole weeks only. And you can't add an untimed event by clicking in the Untimed field, even though double-clicking works in the timed section. Also, calendars published to .Mac accounts aren't password-protected.