QuickCal

If you use iCal on your Mac, this one's for you.  QuickCal is a little app that handles one of those petty annoyances that I have with iCal.  How often have you been doing something on your Mac and you need to enter an appointment on your calendar? You stop whatever you are doing, go to the iCalendar, find the date, open the Add Meeting box, and type in all the details.

QuickCal does all this (and more) in a flash.  Let's say you need to make a calendar entry while you are reading an invitation in your mail.  You can either hit the QuickCal Hot Key (which is user-settable but the default is Shift-Command-C) or click the QuickCal icon in the Dock. A popup window appears and you type your appointment in simple english.

As you type in the black box, the white box below the entry line opens which fills in the calendar data appropriately - even location!  Hit Return and your entry is automatically posted to your calendar.

What's more, QuickCal has built in reminder alarms (user settable again) which mean you don't have to set them manually. QuickCal can also handle To Do lists by starting or ending with 'todo' or entering some Task by Date entry format. All of this for three bucks!  I love it.

Read more on the developer's website here.