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NOTE: Upgrading to Snow Leopard broke the ability to perform this action as the option to save as a plugin is gone. If you are running Snow Leopard and want to do this, go to this blog post for instructions.

I have been cleaning and organizing information on my Mac (shocking, I know) and I found that I wasn’t getting birthday reminders since opting to use the birthday field in iCal. Found this workaround using Automator in a support forum online…

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1 – Open Address Book. Go File>New Smart Group
2 – Call your smart group ‘Birthdays Coming Up’ or something like that. On the drop-down menus, left to right, select ‘Birthday’ ‘is in the next’ and then type in 1 and then select ‘weeks’. Click OK.

You are now going to create a workflow. There are three columns. From left to right you have the Library, Actions, and Workflow columns. To create your Birthday reminder automation you will be dragging items from the Actions to Workflow. (Workflow should be the larger of the frames and should start empty.

3 – Now open Automator in applications.
4 – It should come up with a start menu to chose from Select ‘Custom’ and click ‘choose’. If it doesn’t then just go to File>New and select ‘custom’
5 – Selecting ‘Contacts’ in the Library column (Leftmost column). Then select ‘Find Address Book Items’ in the Actions column and drag it into your workflow column (rightmost column). Your item turns into a box of instructions once in the right-hand column. In your new box, you can see ‘Find Groups’ and ‘Whose: ‘Name’ ‘Contains’ ‘EMPTY FIELD”. In the empty field type ‘birthday’ (so that the box now reads Find: Groups, Whose Name Contains birthday).
6 – Next drag ‘Get Contact Information’ to the large right-hand column. Place it underneath your ‘Find Address Book Items’ box. Select which parts of the contact information you wish to be sent in your reminder email. By default ‘Birthday’ is not selected. If you don’t want to be wishing people happy birthday on the wrong day I suggest selecting it.
7 – Next click ‘Mail’ in the Library column. Select and drag ‘New Mail Message’ from the actions column across to the workflow column underneath ‘Get Contact Information’ box. Type in the email address you wish your reminder to be sent and in subjects put something that will be obvious to you each week… like ‘BIRTHDAYS!!!’ Also make sure use choose the account to send the email from. I imagine that the default would work just fine but if you want a specific email address then this is the place to chose.
8 – Next drag ‘Send Outgoing Messages’ from the Actions column to the workflow column underneath the ‘New Mail Message’ box.

‘Quit Application’ is not needed because you are not going to add this to iCal manually. You are going to create a iCal Plug-in and I found it worked without this step. If you feel better about having a Quit call in your Automator plugin then it won’t hurt to put it in.

9 – Next save your work. Type in a name for your workflow and save it in a place that you will remember (e.g. create a new folder called Automator Workflows in your Applications folder or personal directory). Save the workflow as a workflow. Don’t close anything yet; we haven’t quite finished!
10 – Now select ‘Utilities’ from the Library column and drag ‘Run Workflow’ from the Actions column to the TOP (yes the top) of the Workflow column. It should now be above ‘Find Groups in Address Book’ box. From its drop-down menu choose the name of the workflow you have just saved. Also you will need to de-select ‘Wait for workflow to finish’. It won’t work unless you do this (with or without the ‘Quit Application’ Action).
11 – Save the workflow again.
12 – Next select Save As Plug-in from the File menu. Name it something useful like BIRTHDAYS!!! and chose from the drop down box the iCal options and click Save.

You should find that iCal now opens up with a new ‘Automator’ Calendar item and your first iCal event should be in today’s date with the same name as you gave to your iCal Plugin. You can now quit Automator.

13 – Double click on the event and click on ‘Edit’. Remember when you are selecting a time for this to happen make sure you are confident your computer will be on. I chose Every Sunday from 9am to 9am.
14 – You will also notice that there is no repeat yet. So if you want to be always reminded of birthdays then now would be the time to select ‘every week’ from the repeat pull down menu. Now the option ‘end’ should have appeared. You can leave this alone so long as you want to continue to be reminded of birthdays.

NOTE: In the alarm preference notice it already has Open File and your iCal plugin BIRTHDAYS!!!. You do not need to do anything to this.

16 – You should now be done and should now get an email each week telling you whose birthdays are coming up.

OPTIONAL VARIATIONS. If you want to just see birthdays that are related to a particular group (ie. Work people, Friends, youth group members) then you can create a separate Automator for each exactly the same as the above but changing step 5 to:

5 – Selecting ‘Contacts’ in the Library column (Leftmost column). In the middle column click on ‘Find Address Book Items’ and drag it into the wide right-hand column. Your item turns into a box of instructions once in the right-hand column. In your new box, you can see ‘Find: ‘Groups’ and ‘Whose: ‘Name’ ‘Contains’ ‘EMPTY FIELD”. At ‘Find:’ select ‘People’. The ‘Whose” should now read ‘Groups’ ‘is’ ‘GROUP’. The group will probably be the first grouping of contacts you have in your address book. Click on the arrows on your ‘GROUP’ and select the ‘GROUP’ you want.
5a- Next to your selected ‘GROUP’ there are ‘-’ and ‘+’ signs. Click on the ‘+’. In the new line click on ‘Group’ and change to ‘Birthday’ and change ‘today’ to ‘this week’.