Subscribe to iCal events using Mozilla

Sep 21, '02 10:08:57AM

Contributed by: erehnke

One of the most interesting parts of the new iCal app is the ability to subscribe to event calendars. Unfortunately, when I tried clicking on the subscription links on the Apple site while using the Mozilla browser (my current favorite), nothing happened. I had to drag and drop the url into the subscribe screen. This operation worked perfectly when I switched back to Internet Explorer.

While doing some digging around in the weblog world, I happened upon a solution to the problem at the Disobey Nonsense Network, one of the weblog sites I found. Here's how to do it:

  1. Open Internet Explorer
  2. Open Preferences
  3. Go to Network -> Protocol Helpers and click "Add"
  4. Call the new helper "webcal" (use lowercase text only!!)
  5. Click on the Helper App button and select your iCal application
  6. Check the box to "use current application if possible.
Now shut down and restart Mozilla. Go to the Apple iCal site and click on one of the subscription links. It should work fine. Evidently, changing the preference in IE also affected the operation of Mozilla. Go Figure!

[Editor's note: This data gets written into com.apple.internetconfig.plist in your ~/Library/Preferences folder, but it appears to be encoded in some manner which would prevent manually editing the file. So if you've trashed IE from your drive, I'm not sure how you'd go about setting this helper. But it definitely works as described if you do have IE.]

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