Migrating from Now Up-to-Date to iCal

Back in the day, Now Up-to-Date (NUD) was the undisputed champion of calendar sharing for Mac users. We know, we're the original developers. But it's getting a little long in the tooth, and doesn't sync with the iPhone, so many NUD users are migrating to iCal. But how do you transfer all those events in NUD to iCal?

NUD to iCal is a free utility that copies events from Now Up-to-Date to iCal. It will create a new calendar in iCal for each category in NUD and copy all events to it. Events in NUD are converted to the following event types in iCal:

NUD	iCal
Appointment	Event
Banner Special Holiday	All Day Event
To-Do Call Undated	ToDo
Sticky Note Graphic	NA

How to use NUD to iCal
Launch NUD to iCal and select the following options:

• Source calendar — You may copy events from all calendars (categories) in NUD, or a single calendar.
• Date — All events after the date specified will be copied to iCal.

It is recommended that you set a short date range, like one year, and NOT import 10+ years of events from NUD to iCal, as it will take a long time (many hours) to process and iCal will run very slowly if you add that many events to it.

When you click Start, a new calendar will be created in iCal for each source calendar (category) in NUD, and all events that occur after the date specified will be copied to iCal. The progress will be displayed on the bottom of the window while the events are being imported.

Processing can take a while depending on the size of your calendar. Make sure you allow plenty of time for processing to complete and do not use or quit NUD or iCal while NUD to iCal is running. You may click the Stop button at any time to stop processing.

An alert will be displayed once processing is complete, informing you how many events were imported and to reconfigure the repeating events in iCal.

 

Note: NUD stores repeating events as a series of individual events, whereas iCal stores repeating events as a single event with a recurrence rule. Therefore, repeating events in NUD are not copied to iCal. Instead, only the first occurrence of a repeating event in NUD is copied to iCal and the word "[REPEATING]" is appended to the event title so you can easily find these events in iCal and reconfigure the repeat interval.

You may search for the repeating events in iCal by entering "repeating" in the search field in the upper-right hand corner of iCal.

A list of the matching events will appear on the bottom of the window.

 

You may then double-click each one, and reconfigure the repeat interval and edit the event title, as appropriate.

 

And that's it. All of your events in NUD have been copied to iCal.

Download NUD to iCal

Comments

[alixnotes]

I am really looking forward to this app. And since reading this blog, I realise that I recognised the style of NUD which I used extensively years ago.

Brilliant work, guys
Alix :)

[Skip Hine]

I've tried several times to download but I get this:
"DOWNLOAD ERROR:...nudtoical.zip could not be opened, because an unknown error occurred. Try saving to disk first and then try opening the file."
I get this almost as soon as the app starts to download - I don't have a chance to do anything else.
What do I do now? Skip

[Peter B]

You are a wonderful, wonderful person. At last someone has taken seriously the wishes of many, many people writing to nowuptodate, but only receiving words and no action.
It works brilliantly - a thousand thanks.

[Richard]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you!
NUD had so many bugs in version 4 that it was a nightmare. I’m not crazy about iCal, but I had to have something that would actually work reliably! I’ve been asking Now for several years for a way to export from NUD to iCal.
THANK YOU!! (And thanks to Adam and TidBits for the lead!)

[Dave Hamilton]

Just launched again this morning after a long night importing and a crash, and when I did it told me that 1.01 is (now) available. This fixes the multiple to-do bug that was in 1.0. So if you've already downloaded, get it again now! ;-)

[SkiAddict]

I have no problems downloading it, but when I run it I get an error "The variable myDesc is not defined. (-2753)" How come no-one else seems to be having this problem? Am I uniquely cursed? ;-)

[Keith Parr]

Thank you very much for this, migrating to iCal has been on my to-do list for a long time but I just knew it was going to be a pain so it got put off and put off.
This made it a breeze - farewell NUDC!
Thanks also to the TidBits team for the heads up!
Keith

[SkiAddict]

Many thanks BusyMac for contacting me so quickly about my problem running this applet (see post January 24th). It seems the problem was I'm using a geriatric NUD (3.6.2!) -- unfortunately NUD 5 can't import my calendar...it has a "database length" problem!! Oh well how sad never mind and thanks once again BusyMac, nice to have such quick turnaround with a problem.

[christine]

I think I am in love. After years of making duplicate entries, I can batch them up and zoom them over. Many many thanks!

[A VERY GREATFUL PRODUCER.]

YOU JUST SAVED ME SO MUCH TIME! THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU!

[Martin]

Thank you very much for this !

A related question:

After I have imported my Now up to date calendars into iCal, those calendars are now "local calendars".

How do I transfer all the events from those calendars to an iCal Server calendar?

Thanks
Martin

[Annie M.]

Thank you for this program. One problem: All the calendars I have import perfectly except for one. When I click to import this specific calendar, it says that 0 events were imported. Do I need to change a setting somewhere in NUD? Thank you.

[fotofah]

I’m running OS 10.5.6, latest version of NUD, latest version of iCal. I downloaded NUD to iCal a few hours ago. I can get it to complete transferring.

The first time NUD to iCal stalled when NUD suddenly quit. (It was then at “processing 2776, 1579 imported” trying to convert my calendar since 12/07. The 2nd time it stopped (after importing about 1,500 events I got an error message with “AppleScript error. Now Up-to-Date got an error: Can’t get uniqueid of event 1701 of category (item 1 of (Personal”) of document 1. (-1728).

I’d really *like* to be able to complete the transfer. Any ideas on the cause of the problem or the solution?

(I just ran Apple Disk First Aid and Diskwarrior yesterday a.m. as part of my weekly diagostics/maintenance.)

[John]

fotofah -- it sounds like Now Up-to-Date is running out of memory while the AppleScript is processing. To avoid that from happening, I suggest you run the script on one category/calendar at a time, rather than selecting All Calendars. Also, you may want to limit the date range so it doesn't have to process quite as many events.

[fotofah]

Thanks for the help. I *am* only running one category at a time. I tried (4th time?) last night to run this by logging in to my User with the shift key down, no other apps running at the same time. It still had the same sort of error (with NUTD quitting).

The specific error messages were: "AppleScript Error. Now Up-To-Date got an error. Connection is invalid. (-60)"

Also in a different window: "Processing event 3349, 1499 events imported."

My next step, yes, would be to not have it import from Dec. 2007, but perhaps from just Jan., 2009(?) to make the range smaller.

Is there any "Plan B" you know of, another script or application, I could try if I can't get this one to work?

I have 5 GB on my Mac Pro, but don't know of any way I could specifically allot more RAM to NUTD.

Again, thanks for the help!

And BTW, I'm assuming there's no way in iCal to have a banner across say, Mon.- Fri. to show I have a guest teacher in my school for those 5 days and have it be very clear to see.

[John]

fotofah -- send me an email at support@busymac.com and I'll help you directly rather than doing it here.

[joy]

I love you!

[Felix]

Hi!

I downloaded NUD to iCal and gave it a try with our company calendar and it worked fine.
One issue I ran into is that all Events of the type "All Day" in NUD are transfered to the wrong date in iCal i.e. one day off in the past

[John]

Felix -- The events may have been scheduled in NUD in a different time zone from the one you are in now, which could cause the imported events to shift in iCal. Although, I would have expected all events to be off by several hours, and not just all-day events. if that is the case after all, then you should set the timezone on your Mac to the same time zone as NUD was using when the events were created, and run the script again. Then all of the events should be imported with a matching local time. Then you can set your time zone back to normal you're done.

[Felix]

Hey John thank you for replying so quickly. I did a little testing and it seems like the problem occurs only with "All Day" events. All other events have their correct date and time. The timezone is set to Berlin on the Server and on the clients. I also created a test event on the same machine I did the import on later, same problem here.

Do you have any other suggestions? Would be nice if you could help me there.

[nigel]

I have seen this all day event time shift backwards by a day also

Any answers on this one???