While I agree with Dave on the podcast that it is disappointing that iCal does not have support for recurring tasks, I was able to find a way to make this work. Because iCal does have support for recurring appointments, and because those appointments can have alarms, you can take advantage of the fact that the alarms can play AppleScripts to create recurring tasks in a backwards way.

What I have done is the following (though some of these things are optional):

- I created a special calendar - which I call "ongoing taks" - to hold these events (though that is just to segregate them from my other events, and to keep them from being synced to my phone, as I can sync by calendar.)

- I created an AppleScript which I call "PayKidsAllowance.scpt" with the following code (between the string of asterisks):

*****
tell application "iCal"
set newtodo to (make new todo at end of todos of calendar "ongoing tasks")
tell newtodo
set summary to "Pay Kids Allowance"
set due date to current date
make new display alarm at end with properties {trigger interval:0}
end tell
end tell
******

- I created an event called "Pay Kids Allowance" which I have run every Saturday. In the event, I have an alarm set to "Run Script", I browse to set the script to the file I listed above, and I set the recurrence to happen every wek on Saturday.

This will create a new ToDo every Saturday, and I am able to track when I pay my kids based on when I checked off the task. I do this for more than this simple example - I have one that reminds me to print the school lunch calendar the first of every month, with the following AppleScript:

tell application "iCal"
set newtodo to (make new todo at end of todos of calendar "Ongoing Tasks")
tell newtodo
set summary to "Print Lunch Menu"
set due date to current date
set url to "http://sample.url/main.html"
make new display alarm at end with properties {trigger interval:0}
end tell
end tell

As you can see, you can do cool things like add a web site URL to the task as well.

This system has some drawbacks, as you must create individual scripts for each to do. I'm not much of an AppleScript expert, but these are really not all that hard to copy and paste, and once it is set up, it does work well.

I will note that under Tiger I found that iCal needed to be running for these scripts to run, so I have iCal set as a login item for my account. But Leopard will launch the scripts even without iCal running, so it works even better now than it did when I set it up.

I do agree, however, that it would be far better for iCal to support recurring tasks instead.