I hear that Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard will herald the return of the permanently visible event inspector panel in iCal. I've really missed it for the last couple of years. Double clicking each item then clicking "Edit" is a major chore and I look forward to getting back to the simple old ways.

Whilst they're at it I hope they fix the basic mouse event handling so I can reliably grab and drag the edges of an event. The current behaviour seems to be based on coin flips.

Update: It's not quite what I hoped unfortunately. Rather than having a fixed panel for displaying and editing the full details of the currently selected event, there is a popup window. In exactly the same manner as the Finder's Get Info window, this can also be opened as an 'inspector' that changes to reflect the current selection. It is always a floating window above the rest of the UI rather than a built-in portion of the main iCal window like it used to be. I've arranged my main iCal window and inspector alongside each other and thankfully they both reappear when the app is quit and reopened. So nearly, but not quite what I was after.