Wooden Brain Concepts

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Notifications from iCal and Address Book

OmniGrowl will notify you of upcoming events and to-dos in iCal, without having to set any alarms. On Leopard and higher, iCal doesn’t need to be open. (However, please see this note regarding the new MobileMe calendars.)

OmniGrowl can also notify you of special dates in your Address Book such as birthdays and anniversaries. Address Book does need to be open for this.

You can exclude certain calendars from iCal and certain custom dates from Address Book.

Location Information

OmniGrowl will automatically attempt to get location information from your "me" card in Address Book, if open. If it is wrong, it can be changed on the Personal tab. The "State" field must be a 2 letter postal code for U.S. states or Canadian provinces. When setting a country, please choose from the popup menu.

Yahoo Weather: Finding your Yahoo Where On Earth ID (WOEID)

If you live in the U.S., simply enter a zip code and leave the WOEID blank. However, you can enter one if you prefer.

If you live outside the U.S. you must provide a Yahoo WOEID on the Personal tab. Enter your city in the "Enter city or zip code" search field of the Yahoo Weather main page. If there are multiple matches, click the correct city. The address bar of the resulting forecast page will show a URL which contains the numerical WOEID at the end. For example, the WOEID for Rome, Italy is 721943.

Note that Yahoo has replaced the older "Location ID" with this WOEID. The Location ID for London was UKXX0085. For now, old Location IDs will still work, but Yahoo may eventually require the new WOEID, even for U.S. locations.

Flight Status

OmniGrowl checks iCal for events that have a specific flight format:
Airline Flight# DepartAirport-ArriveAirport
For example:
  • NWA 333 DTW-MSP
  • United Airlines flight #444 LAX-LGA
  • NW fl 333 SFO-CGK
  • AA333 LGA to LHR
This string can be either the iCal event title or the first paragraph of the event notes.

This format is somewhat flexible. Airline names can be shortened in many cases, the full name can be used, but standard airline codes are preferred (and faster). IATA, ICAO, and FlightStats codes are supported. Flight numbers can include "#" and various manifestations of "flight" are ignored. Standard airport codes must be used for the itinerary portion.

For an iCal event to be recognized as a flight, the last "word" must be the itinerary (like DTW-MSP as above) and the second to last word must be the flight number, and the beginning of the string must match an airline.

If the first word starts with alpha and ends with numeric, as in "AA333" above, it will be broken into "AA 333". Also, " to " will be converted to "-" as in "AA333 LGA to LHR" above. This works well with the format used for the iCal feed from the travel site TripIt.

Note that because the way each person enters flights in iCal will be different, because time zones are ignored, and because flights might be greatly delayed, it is best to set a wide notification period (before the flight starts and after the flight ends).