What’s so confusing about it? You really need to see how it interacts with the iCal main window to understand. We’re going to be focusing on the group starting with “Hide Calendar List.”

The iCal main window looks like this:

The sidebar on the left side of the screen looks simple enough. Now let’s look again at the menu. What would you expect Hide Calendar List to do?

Wrong. It does this:

Both the calendar and mini month calendar are hidden. Hiding both makes sense, but calling the command Hide Calendar List doesn’t. Go back to the menu, and we see the helpful command “Hide Mini Months.” What Mini Months? Oh, the ones that were on the iCal window, but aren’t anymore? I wonder what it does?

It does this:

That’s right. Choosing Hide Mini Months showed the mini calendar.

So here’s how the menu commands work:

The first command, Show/Hide Calendar List, hides the entire left side bar: The calendar list and whatever is under it.

The second and third commands, Show/Hide Mini Months/Notifications, control what’s under the calendar list, but still controlled with the Show/Hide Calendar List command. And they don’t actually do what they say they’re going to do if the calendar lis is hidden. They’re mutually exclusive: Think of them as Under Calendar List: None, Mini Months, or Notifications.

The fourth and fifth items are entirely independent of the first three items.

Granted, coming up with menu commands to control a UI like this is hard. But that’s no excuse to throw your hands in the air and settle on this UI.