iCal comes with the iLife software bundle pre-installed on every Mac OS X out of box; I use iCal pretty much every day to manage my schedule and planning. You could synchronize your iCal with your iPhone and iPod Touch while connected to iTunes; if you have signed up MobileMe service like I do, you can even enjoy synchronization over the air.

However, I do found out the one of the features that iCal doesn’t not set up by default for the users; that’s the birthday display on iCal. Let’s say you add a contact to your Address Book, and you want to remind yourself about this contact’s birthday. If you don’t know Apple actually includes the “Birthday” function in iCal and Address Book, you might just add your contacts’ birthdays as an event that repeat every year. I don’t find it surprising at all because I did the same thing when I first migrated to Mac.

1. Setting for Address Book

Now let’s open your Address Book, navigate to “Address Book –> Preference” on the top left corner (or hit “Command” + “,” while Address Book is in the front). You will need to click on the “Template” tab on top as shown below:

There is a drop down menu where it says “Add Field” in the picture, click it and choose “Birthday“:

Now you can go ahead and set your contacts’ birthdays as shown below:

Once you are done with the input of the birthdays data, we can move to iCal.

2. Setting for iCal:

With you iCal on the front, we navigate to the “iCal–>Preference” (or hit “Command” + “,” ), we will need to check “Show Birthdays calendar“:

Once you finished the above step, you will find that you iCal has a new subscription called “Birthdays” on the left panel:

And we are done.

Post Note:

What iCal does is adding in non-editable events for you using the data you key into your Address Book. If you would like to edit or remove the birthday data, you will have to edit the contact information in the Address Book.