actually, I think you'll find alarms work fine without ical being open, if it is set that way in the prefs
cheers

One great thing to do with this is to create a birthday reminder that runs every morning (or whenever else you want) and sends an email to whose ever birthday is today, tomorrow, or this week. The three commands are, which are also spelled out in the send birthday greeting action:

1.Find people with Birthdays (Address Book)
2.Send birthday greetings (Mail)
3.Send outgoing messages (Mail)

Then just set the iCal settings as above to run the app, and it sends a message to everyone who has a birthday according to the settings. It is all self explanatory.

Yea, getting your mac to send out greetings automatically really enforces the sentiment.

:) - yeah someone's going to come up with a hack to "Order Cake n' supplies" rather than "Printer Supplies"

This is great. I wanted to check some of my Mail accounts less frequently than the others. Mail does not seem to allow that. So, I create an Automator application to check such an account, and set up a daily event in iCal with an alarm that opens that application.

You could also use cron. It would do the same thing :)


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-frick

I think it's much simpler this way:

1. "Save As Plug-In..." your workflow
2. Choose Plug-In for: "iCal Alarm" in the pop-up menu of the dialog box that appears
3. iCal opens itself and automatically creates an event with an alarm that opens your workflow

*** Your workflow plugin remains installed in iCal to use it with other alarms under the option "Open file" and saved into in ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/iCal

ignoring application responses
	tell application "Automator"
		activate
		execute the workflow "YourWorkflowHere.workflow"
	end tell
end ignoring

That sounds good but neither iCal (nor Retrospect) will allow for intervals smaller than a day. Specifically, I'm trying to backup a small file either every time it changes or every 15 minutes. I tried using Folder Actions but couldn't figure it out.