CalMunger

NB: this bug has since been fixed in Mail.app 3.1, released with Leopard. If you need an excuse to upgrade to Leopard, then this is it.

Fixes a bug in iCal when receiving invites from Entourage and Outlook.

Symptoms

An alert box saying "There was a problem receiving this event invitation" sometimes when receiving ical files from people using Outlook or Entourage?

This app accepts drag-and-dropped ical invites, process them and passes them through to iCal without errors. I cant guarantee that the invite will work perfectly, as I have to cut some data out to make it work, but it seems OK for me. YMMV.

You can either drop problem iCal files onto the icon for this app, right click on the iCal file and pick "open with CalMunger" or you can set it as the registered hander for iCal invites. Dopping problem ones is probably the best idea, but if you're as lazy as me installing it should be OK.

Download

Get the app here. To install, download and open the disk image and drag the CalMunger icon to the Applications folder.

Source

If you want the source it's available here, but its under no particular licence, because it's botched together from lots of sample code off the web, and I can't work out what the licence is. It's my first Cocoa app, so it won't be a very good example of coding.

The Problem

iCal.app seems to be allergic to the RECURRENCE-ID field of VCalendar files - or at least the ones generated by Outlook. This app just replaces those fields with the X-RECURRENCE-ID field. I've not checked if it accepts iCal generated RECURRENCE-ID fields OK, or even if iCal ever generates them.

Those fields are presumably for something, so by using this all the time you will probably loose some capability. It Works For Me though.

I've filed a bug with Apple with Problem ID 5162479. Hopefully iCal.app will be fixed soon.

— Steve