Update: hmmm… looks like this may be only a temporary fix after all. It worked yesterday, rolling from Sept. 2 to 3, but this morning the date didn’t update to Sept. 4. I’m still searching for a solution, but based on the number of other folks I’m seeing report this issue, hopefully there will be an actual fix in 10.6.1.

This is just a quick little tip I was going to post to Twitter, but I needed a little more than 140 characters to explain it. If you’re like me, ever since Leopard fixed iCal so that it’s dock icon would always display the correct date, even when it wasn’t open, you’ve had iCal as a permanent resident of your dock.

However, this morning I noticed that since updating to Snow Leopard, iCal was only showing the correct date when it was open. As soon as I closed it, it would revert back to displaying Sept. 1 as the date. With all of the little tweaks and enhancements in Snow Leopard, I was pretty bugged that this old issue had crept back in. This issue doesn’t seem to appear on every Mac that’s been updated to Snow Leopard, but based on what I’ve found in my searching for a solution, it’s been hitting more than a few Macs out there.

Luckily, the fix for this was pretty easy: remove iCal from your dock, then drag it back in. As soon as I did that, even when closed, iCal’s dock icon began displaying the correct date again.