One issue that has plagued the Address Book & iCal combination, is that you are offered the option to automatically add birthday reminders to your calendar….  That’s fantastic, and will help me prevent the possibility of missing a friends/relatives birthday.

But then, how did I forget Aunt Flo’s birthday, last week?  Click.  Why doesn’t the birthday reminder, have an alarm?  What?  You mean, I have to go through the entire 12 months of the year, and manually add alarms for each event?  What if I add another contact?  I’ll have to go add that to?

It’s a great idea, but the execution has been off, and Apple doesn’t seem to want to add this critical feature…

Never fear, the following applescript, can fix that….

tell application "iCal"
  tell calendar "Birthdays"
    set all_events to every event
    repeat with this_event in all_events
       tell this_event
          delete every sound alarm
          make new sound alarm at end with properties {trigger interval:-(10*days), sound name:"Basso"}
        end tell
     end repeat
  end tell
end tell

The script will have to be run anytime you add more birthday entries, but it’ll allow you to set as many reminders you want per entry…

All credit for this needs to go to Andrew.Bussman from the MacRumors Forums…

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