I prefer using iCal in “Weekly” view mode. My problem with this mode though is that once you get towards the end of the week, you will not see what is coming up the next day(s) without explicitly switching to the next week – surely we can fix this?

What I wanted was to be able to see today, maybe the day before, and the next 5 days. After all, the past 6 days is seldom useful, but it’s nice to know what is happening the next 3-5 days.

This script will do this for you. It does so by changing the “Start Week On” preference in iCal everyday at midnight.

To reiterate, my preferred setting is to have the SECOND day of the week be TODAY. If you’d prefer another day, change the number 5 in the script below(4 = 1st day, 5 = 2nd day, etc).

The Applescript to perform this is:

-- Quit iCal if it is open
tell application "System Events" to set isiCalOpen to count ¬
	(every process whose creator type is "wrbt")
if (isiCalOpen is 1) then tell application "iCal" to quit

-- Make the change
do shell script ¬
	"defaults write com.apple.ical \"first day of week\" -int " & ((((weekday of (current date)) as integer) + 5) mod 7)
delay 2
-- Open iCal
tell application "iCal" to activate

Open in Script Editor

If you’d like to have this script run everyday, you may want to check out the excellent Launchd editor, Lingon. My LaunchAgent file can be downloaded here: iCal LaunchAgent.