yCal Concepts

Remote Calendars

yCal always and only operates on your local machine's calendars. This is done through an official application programming interface (API) provided by Apple. However, this interface has a few limitations: for example, it does not provide any support for accessing remote calendars hosted on servers in the network, it does not provide information about calendar groupings (as you can see and configure them in iCal or Calendar), and it does not allow to set attendees for events.

Access to remote calendars is currently only supported through the help of Apple's native calendaring app (iCal on 10.7, or Calendar on 10.8): these apps mirror remote calendars on your local machine and synchronize all changes and updates both ways. So by once in a while starting up iCal (or Calendar), all your remote calendars get sync'ed and you can use them in yCal as well. There is a preferences option in yCal to start iCal (or Calendar) in the background automatically when you run yCal, so you don't have to remember about syncing.

We know that this is a little cumbersome. We have started to work on our own protocol implementation to access remote calendars via CalDAV. Once we finished this update, life will get a little easier.