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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars Apps

Here's a very small hint on how to get a cleaner calendar display (without vertical scrollbars) in iCal when displaying all-day events.

One thing that always bugged me about iCal, from 1.0 until now in 1.5.1, was its logic of displaying hours of a day in the daily and weekly views. You can set the preferences to display a day from 8AM to midnight, and to display 16 hours at a time, meaning you see the full day without having to scroll - perfect so far.

Now, as soon as you add an all-day event, only approximately 15.5 hours fit into the view and a scrollbar appears - incredibly stupid. Even though there would be an easy workaround, namely to display more hours in a day, these choices are greyed out in the preferences panel. That's what brought me to look at the app's defaults via the command line.

The simple trick is to use the defaults command to set more hours than necessary, depending on the number concurrent of all-day events you usually have in one display. Just try higher values than you can set up in the preferences by opening a Terminal window and typing:

defaults write com.apple.ical "number of hours displayed" XX

Replace XX with the actual number of new hours you wish to see. For my setup, using 19 hours usually gives me a perfect weekly display.

[robg adds: This is a great little hint! The scroll bars on all-day events have bugged me, too, and I couldn't think of a good way around them -- I also find it odd that resizing the window resizes the existing hours instead of showing more hours.]

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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars | 11 comments | Create New Account
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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars
Authored by: lee1 on Oct 22, '03 11:03:09AM

In my iCal (v. 1.0.2) I can set any number of hours to display up to 24.



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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars
Authored by: feelgood on Oct 22, '03 11:20:32AM

Ditto for the latest (1.5.1). In fact, I think this has been a basic preference item from the very beginning.



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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars
Authored by: escowles on Oct 22, '03 12:09:20PM

What I see in 1.5.1 is this: the pulldown menu for number of hours displayed is limited to only showing the number of hours between the start and end of the day. So if I start at midnight and end at midnight, I can indeed show all 24 hours.

But what you need to avoid the scrollbars with all-day events, is 1 or 2 hours more than the number of hours in the day, to provide the extra room. I can't believe that the all-day events don't get their own space that's separate from the hourly display (with a thumb so I can make it larger).

I've reported this to Apple as a bug before. I have a lot of all-day events (living abroad means two sets of holidays to keep track of...), so this bug makes iCal very annoying for me.

-Esme



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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars
Authored by: lee1 on Oct 22, '03 01:04:02PM
I can't believe that the all-day events don't get their own space that's separate from the hourly display (with a thumb so I can make it larger).

They do, at least in my universe. Make a new event, check the "All-day event" box in the info window, and the event gets stowed in a special pane above the hourly display. This pane grows and shrinks as needed. No scrolling necessary.



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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars
Authored by: andreas999 on Oct 22, '03 12:19:50PM

Lovely!

Thanks!



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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars
Authored by: chancer on Oct 22, '03 11:36:20PM

This bugs me too. Thanks for the solution. I've noticed, however, that it stops working as soon as you open the preferences - as soon as you do, the display is changed back to the one with the annoying scrollbar.

I'm saving this hint in my notepad so I can reset the display any time I need to in the future. Looks like I'll need it any time I change iCal prefs.



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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars
Authored by: rofl on Oct 23, '03 02:59:20AM

Thank you for this solution.



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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars
Authored by: biggyfishy on Oct 23, '03 05:06:19AM
I've been so unbelievably irritated by this bug, this hint is the best news of the week!

I wrote a quick applescript to put in the iCal script menu (ie put the compiled script in ~/Library/Scripts/Applications/iCal/) to make this workaround more convenient:

set hrs to do shell script "defaults read com.apple.ical 'number of hours displayed'"
do shell script ("defaults write com.apple.ical 'number of hours displayed' " & (hrs + 1))

tell application "iCal"
quit
delay 1
activate
end tell

As someone said, just open up the iCal preferences to revert the view to its original form.

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I'm doing somethign wrong
Authored by: Deut3221 on Nov 05, '03 08:43:34AM

When I type: defaults write com.apple.ical \"number of hours displayed\" 19

terminal doesn't recognize something and I get an error message. I'm not too sharp on this stuff. Any suggestions appreciated. Thanks.
-s



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I'm doing somethign wrong
Authored by: metavurt on Nov 23, '03 04:32:19PM

are you actually putting in the backslashes? those are unnecessary. type *exactly* what was typed in the first post, _except_ replace the XX with a double-digit number. do not use backslashes in front of the quotes. the quotes are necessary and need to be read

---
••• There is no spoon •••



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More hours displayed per day in iCal to remove scroll bars
Authored by: henk on Mar 05, '08 05:46:29AM

in your home folder/Library/Preferences

make backup copy of:

com.apple.iCal.plist

change in this file the following numbers:

<key>first minute of day time range</key>
<integer>480</integer>
<key>first minute of work hours</key>
<integer>480</integer>
<key>first shown minute of day</key>
<integer>480</integer>


In this example, your day starts at 8.



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