Fixing Lion's iCal View, or, the One with No Overlaps

If your schedule has overlapping entries, and you are running Lion and using iCal on a desktop, you have likely run into the frustrations of Lion's frustratingly inept way of displaying events—overlapping them in a confusingly nonsensical way, and blocking the titles of some overlapping events, and making it terribly hard to schedule a new event in any time that was not totally blank.

So let's:


As you can see in the below screenshot, even selecting or double-clicking on an event will not bring it to the front, so the event title and details are not visible unless the event is opened to Edit mode. Lame! Sure, in a perfect world, nothing would ever be going on at the same time as anything else, and we'd all have 3 hour workdays broken up with midday naps, but if you have chunks of time in your calendar as FYIs that may overlap actual appointments, overlaps are simply inevitable. This should NOT equal an unreadable calendar!

Before

After!

Use Terminal.app to turn on the iCal Debug Menu - defaults write com.apple.iCal IncludeDebugMenu 1

Then in iCal go to the debug menu > Top Sekret (sic) > Uncheck "use iPad style event layout."

Quit iCal and restart.

I did exactly this, and it exactly worked! And I'd actually never used Terminal before (except for this one time our IT guy walked me through it, telling me over my shoulder to type things that were way over my comprehension level), so even if this "code" scares you a little, you can totally do it, too!