A fix for iCal refusing to show a given view

Apr 10, '06 05:43:00AM

Contributed by: Richard Guy

After several years of use, under 10.4.3 through 10.4.5 on a PowerBook G4, iCal suddenly refused to display the week view -- the one I depend on the most! The failure mode appeared (as best I can tell) shortly after using an external display which caused a screen resolution switch -- but then again, my teen was using the PB around then also:-)

In addition to refusing to show the week view (either five or seven day), iCal wouldn't show 'all day' events in day view; the vertical scroll bar had disappeared (occasionally to show up literally momentarily and then hide again). Switching to month mode would show only a portion of the month (kinda zoomed in), but Command-3 would kick to the full month, etc.

After a week of frustration, and scouring Apple and the web with Google, I stumbled across the Set identical iCal window sizes hint here. The moment I saw how the plist file was laid out, I had a sneaking suspicion that somehow my file had been corrupted with either 'too large' or 'too small' windows ... and sure enough, the view rects section on my file clearly showed 0,0 and 0,0 as corner coordinates for *only* the 5-day and 7-day key value pairs. I followed the previous hint's instructions, set those two key value pairs to mimic the working 1-day values, and voila! I have my week view back!

It helps to exit iCal first, before editing the plist file: -- otherwise, iCal overwrites your efforts with its (broken) concept of the file.

[robg adds: Trashing the prefs would have also solved the problem, but then you'd have to re-do all your iCal settings (not calendars, just applications prefs).]

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