How is it that Apple can come so close to perfection in developing new features for their software... and then turn around and for all intents and purposes render the same piece of software useless?
Today's culprit is the new To-Do feature added to Mail.app, in which they make it drop-dead simple simple to make any email you receive a To-Do item. Just select some text, click a button, and boom. You have a To-Do.
Add a date to it, and boom. It also appears on your iCal calendar. Sweet.
Only they forgot one little thing...
Maybe it's just me.
And maybe I'm just a little old fashioned about such things. But from time-to-time I actually like to print my To Do list and have it handy so I can read it and carry it around and check things off and give it to others.
So imagine my surprise when I select the list of To-Do's and press Command-P... and nothing happens. Muttering, I go to the File menu, only find the Print option disabled. What the...
Turns out that in Mail you can make all of the To-Do's you want. But you can't print them. Not singly. Not as a group. Not as a list. Nada.
Read that again: You can create all of them you want. But you can't print them.
I stared at the screen, frustrated because I'd just made about two dozen of the silly things. I'd even set the priorities and added dates to some and even specified the calendar that they should appear in (more on THAT later) and... wait. Calendars? Hmmm.
iCal to the rescue?
So I bring up iCal and hunt around for a second and then I find it: View >> Show To Do List. I check it off, and bingo, there are all of my To-Do's.
So I go to Print (at least I can print here), and the Print Preview shows the calendar items, but no plain-jane To-Do's. Wait. There's a View menu there, so maybe... YES! The "List" view shows all of my To-Do's, ready to be printed.
So I print them and... What the #*#&?
Here's a print sample...
Notice the nice little URL strings Apple most kindly added to the second line to each of my To-Do items. I'm not sure exactly what a URL link is doing on a printout, or why they were added, or why they only show up when printing, or why I need to see it... but maybe I'm a little slow about such things.
Bottom line?
So if you want to actually print the To-Do's that you create in Mail, go to iCal. Go to another program to print. Makes perfect sense. And they won't print well, but at least they'll print.
Not that there isn't plenty of other weirdness going on in the new improved version of iCal. But needless to say, I've reported this bug. Here's a link if you want to get on Apple's case and do the same.
I guess it's a good thing that Apple no longer promotes the names of the developers behind most of their software, because there are times I want to seek out the developer responsible for a given program and... ah... never mind.
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