What is BirthdayScanner X ?

One sentence

BirthdayScanner X creates calendar reminders in iCal/Mozilla/Outlook.. from anniversaries in the Address Book.

concept

More than one sentence

Once a friend asked me to write an app to remind him of birthdays. That seemed easy enough. However, I did not want to reinvent the wheel and do anything Apple already does out of the box.

Apple has provided some pieces:

We have iCal in MacOS X - an integrated reminder service, reminds you flawlessly of upcoming events, even if iCal itself is not running.

We also have Address Book - where I can enter birthdays and other anniversaries for any of my contacts.

The missing link was to bring the anniversaries from the Address Book over to iCal.

Note: there is an inbuilt Birthdays calendar in iCal, but for a number of reasons that one is not very useful.

Here is where BirthdayScanner X comes in:

It scans your Address Book and finds all anniversaries - birthdays, wedding days, name days... all of them.
For these anniversaries it generates events in iCal.
Alternatively, you also can save an iCalendar file and import the anniversaries into other calendar applications.

So all you have to do is to maintain the anniversaries of your friends and relatives in Address Book. Put anything in there, Birthdays, Wedding Days, ... and let BirthdayScanner X pick them up.

Tip: BirthdayScanner X even helps you finding contacts which do not yet have Birthdays in Address Book: Open the Anniversary List, click Missing and you see all contacts with no Birthdays. Double-click will open the Address Book right on that contact.