I love Apple’s MobileMe service – and the improvements that came to the Mail service last month were a huge step forward in the right direction, bringing features such as easy archiving, server side rules, vacation messages, and rich text formatting when composing messages on the web.

Now that the update to the Mail service is live for all MobileMe users, Apple is hard at work pushing out a new beta, this time for the calendar application.  Updates in the calendar beta include:

• New web application interface
• Calendar sharing (full editing support)
• Calendar publishing (.ics feeds)
• Event invitations from within the web application

That’s a fairly nice update to the calendar service and web application all together.  The redesigned web app looks very similar (read: almost identical) to the calendar application introduced on the iPad back in April 2010.

Registering for an invite

To register for an invite into the Calendar beta program, go to www.me.com/calendar/ and click “Request an invitation” to receive an invitation via email.

Requirements

Using the calendar beta requires iOS 4 on an iPhone/iPod, iOS 3.2 on iPad, and Mac OS X Snow Leopard 10.6.4 on a Mac.  Outlook on Windows in not currently supported at this time.