How To Get Reminded of Upcoming Birthdays With iCal, Address Book and Automator

For an operating system that prides itself upon its ease of use, it’s pretty darn unbelievable that something as basic as birthday reminders isn’t built into the appropriate applications. Fact is, while Address Book lets you automatically add birthdays to iCal, there’s no way to give these events an alarm setting. But with some Automator fu and some help from iCal, you can work your way around this limitation.

What we’re going to do is create a simple Automator application that finds everyone in our Address Book who’s birthday is coming up soon. Then we’ll create a recurring event in iCal that launches that app every week.

Step 1: Create the Automator application

1. Launch Automator
2. Select Custom in the startup dialog
3. In the library, select Contacts
4. Drag Find People with Birthdays to the area on the right to create a workflow step
5. Set the drop-down box to the interval you want. Note: this will be user-selectable at runtime, so simply choose the setting you’ll probably use most often.
6. Under Options, check the option Show this action when the workflow runs. Note: if you don’t check this, the workflow will always run with the setting you chose in the previous step.
7. Select File->Save As…, give your workflow a name like BirthdayReminder or something similar and choose where you want to save it. The Documents folder in your Home folder is fine.
8. In the File Format dropdown, select Application.
9. Click save and close Automator.

Step 2: Create a recurring event in iCal

1. Launch iCal and select the day of the week and the time at which you would like to be reminded of upcoming birthdays.
2. Create a new event and name it Birthday Reminder.
3. Select the interval at which you would like the event to repeat.
4. Set the alarm action to Open file
5. In the next field select the Automator workflow application you created above.
6. Set when you want the alarm to fire.
7. Click Done

Conclusion

That’s it! Now, each week (or whatever you set the repeat interval of the iCal event to) the Automator workflow you created will be launched by the iCal event and will show you who’s birthday is due in the next week or month (again, whatever you set that to in the workflow).

Tagged as: address book, automator, birthday reminders, ical