UPDATED: Dates to iCal and MobileMe beta

Submitted by John M on 15 August, 2010 - 23:47

UPDATED: A couple of weeks after writing this a user of Dates to iCal wrote to tell me that Dates to iCal is now working with the MobileMe beta.

Apple have recently opened up their MobileMe beta and I have had reports that Dates to iCal is not working with the new beta version of MobileMe that uses CalDAV. I'm working on this and hope to have a solution as soon as possible. See below how to use Dates to iCal with the MobileMe beta.

The MobileMe beta converts the user's local iCal calendars to CalDAV calendars stored on Apple's servers. The Calendar framework developed by Apple that Dates to iCal uses to add items to iCal does not fully support CalDAV calendars (I have raised this as a bug with Apple and hope to have a response soon). This combination means that Dates to iCal cannot write to the newly created MobileMe calendars.

The MobileMe calendar beta has recently been updated so that Dates to iCal can currently work with it. To get it working; Create the calendars you want Dates to iCal to use in the MobileMe group in iCal. Then open Dates to iCal and use the calendar names of the calendars you created in iCal. Once quitted, Dates to iCal will start using these calendars and should work as expected.

I'm grateful to the Dates to iCal users, Dave for letting me know this was working again, also Martin, Troy and Thomas for confirming the workaround.

Obviously, MobileMe beta (being a beta) is subject to unannounced changes. I hope this is a feature they keep.

Topics: 
MobileMe

Comments

Sam Marsh (not verified)

31 July, 2010 - 14:05

Hi John,

Seems to be creating duplicate events for me... These have stretched into the future - any way of deleting the duplicates?

Sam Marsh (not verified)

31 July, 2010 - 14:16

Ok, fixed this by running your iCal dupe app - thanks!

John M

2 August, 2010 - 20:29

Hi Sam. I'm glad you were able to fix it. Thanks for letting me know.

Guido (not verified)

5 August, 2010 - 21:18

Any news on this (won't even ask whether you got a reply from Apple) ... loved this little application ...

Guido

John M

7 August, 2010 - 23:37

Hi Guido,

Nothing as yet.

I've been testing syncing the events using different Apple supplied methods. However they all lack the feature of communicating with secondary (or delegated) CalDAV calendars.

I have not heard back from Apple, but as this is going to be an issue with many other third party applications I'm hoping others will be prompting Apple as well and I expect it's on their queue already.

Guido (not verified)

9 August, 2010 - 14:10

Thanks for the update John ...

Guido

John M

15 August, 2010 - 23:52

The story is updated as Apple have changed their MobileMe calendar beta. Dates to iCal now works with it as expected.

Guido (not verified)

16 August, 2010 - 11:27

Yep ... all back up and running ... brilliant.

Guido

Daniel (not verified)

19 August, 2010 - 00:02

Actually missed 3 birthdays cause I didn't notice I wasn't receiving notifications anymore :[ Thanks for sharing the work-around!

Brad (not verified)

11 October, 2010 - 14:56

I cannot get the sync to work and now I have a constant message on my mac

("The Birthday Calandar does not support events" You can't ad events to the Birthday calendar)

Help!

John M

21 October, 2010 - 22:10

Hi Brad,

Is the calendar you are using called 'Birthday'? Initially use another name and create the calendar under the MobileMe section in iCal. Open Dates to iCal and change the calendar name there to the new one. Then quit Dates to iCal.

Best wishes
John

Thomas (not verified)

21 October, 2010 - 11:03

Hi,
Great app, but I am experiencing odd alert timing changes - just wondering if anybody else is?

I use MobileMe to sync iCal calendars with my iPhone4. The Birthdays and Anniversary calendars sync fine, but the alerts are not the same as those I have set-up in dates2iCal. By default for both Birthdays and Anniversaries I set 3 alerts (both message and sound) at 7 days before, 3 days before and on the day, but what I see on my iPhone4 iCal for a Birthday / Anniversary entry is: only 2 alerts, one at 2 days, 16 hours before, and the second at 8 hours after. The alerts are correct on my Mac iCal.

Anybody else experiencing this?

John M

21 October, 2010 - 22:13

That sounds like it could possibly be a timezone issue. I'd suggest you check the timezone and DST settings on your MAc and iPhone.

Best wishes
John

Frank G (not verified)

31 October, 2010 - 13:49

I experience the same isuue and timezone is on both correct!

John M

6 November, 2010 - 16:57

Hi Frank,
Perhaps this is due to How the iPhone stores all day events. iCal on OSX stores all day events as having a start time (at noon on my system at GMT) with the all day flag set. iPhone seems to create an event that starts at midnight and last 24 hours. A delay of 8 hours between alarm times and those expected would suggest to me that you are in a timezone 8 hours off GMT, this is just conjecture though.

Visitor (not verified)

1 November, 2010 - 13:32

I keep getting the message ' the anniversary calendar does not support events' for no apparent reason , since I upgraded my mobileme calendar.
Any suggestions?

SaylorWolf (not verified)

2 November, 2010 - 17:49

I have the same issue off and on. After upgrading to the new MobileMe calendar, I deleted my old calendars that were used by Dates to iCal and added new ones in the Mobile Me group. This worked perfectly the first time and everything synced to my iPhone.

But it seems like whenever Dates to iCal attempts update the new calendars, I get the 'does not support events' alert. It seems like if I want updated dates from my address book, I'd need to re-run the Dates to iCal process from scratch... I haven't tried making a change in my address book to see if it syncs or not.

I love using this little app instead of the built-in birthday calendar, so I hope it keeps working with the new MobileMe calendar :)

John M

6 November, 2010 - 17:00

Hi SaylorWolf,

Thanks for letting me know. I'm hoping to get this working, although it seems that Apple have not thought to provide a good system to allow third party applications communicate with the new MobileMe Calendar easily.

John

Walied (not verified)

25 November, 2010 - 11:08

I've tried to workaround, but there seems to be a small bug when two people share the same birthday, Dates2iCal seems to keep alternatingly adding and deleting them to infinity, it doesn't increase the number of events though but when you open iCal, it keeps syncing forever with me.com and looking at the day with the 2 birthdays you see the names flipping places for forever.

Walied (not verified)

25 November, 2010 - 11:19

It seems forever was actually finite, I let it run for a while and it stopped on its own, behaving like it should. Sorry about that.

John M

28 November, 2010 - 21:35

Hi Walied,
This appears to be what happens in iCal when you ad a lot of events at the same time and some of them have the same start date/time. This is not something I can control in with Dates to iCal.
Thanks for letting me know.

John M

Robert Bartz (not verified)

16 December, 2010 - 11:23

After switching to the new version of mobile me I am getting a pop up that says "The Anniversary calendar does not support events." "You can't add events to the Anniversary calendar." This pop up will not close.

Matt Ryan (not verified)

3 January, 2011 - 05:02

Any update on this issue? Dates 2 iCal definitely is not working with the final release of the updated MobileMe Calendar. Is this something that is being investigated, or is the issue considered unresolvable?

John M

9 January, 2011 - 01:02

Hi,
Sorry for not getting back before.

The new MobileMe calendar seems to have issues with adding events.
See:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2690013
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2506779
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=12839048&#12839048
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=2689187

I am working on Dates to iCal currently and expect to have a new release soon, but the syncing issues from iCal to MobileMe are only resolvable by Apple.

John M

Koby Bennett (not verified)

31 January, 2011 - 07:37

Hi John, This whole thing is driving me crazy (as well as yourself I imagine)!!. Any news on an update to Dates 2 iCal?? I really miss this app!!!!

Thanks

Koby

John M

9 February, 2011 - 13:45

I am currently working on a new version that hopefully will fix this issue. I expect to have a release shortly.

Malcolm G (not verified)

21 February, 2011 - 22:12

John,

Loaded Dates to Ical 2 yesterday and it did what it said it should do - created alarms from AB birthdays in iCal. I set up two email alerts and three message with sound alerts (5, 3 & 0 days) All looks as it should when viewing the events in iCAl.

However the fun began when I sync'd my iPad. For each alert, only two events were transferred, in each case the 0-day alert was transferred, but randomly either the 5-day or 3-day alert was transferred.

I noticed that the 3 day alert was actually 2 days and 15hrs which I suspect is related to a previous thread re time zones, however it doesn't explain the two random not three sync'd alerts - any thoughts?

(The same happened when sync'ing to iPhone4)

Thanks....

John M

26 February, 2011 - 16:26

Hi Malcolm,
Thanks for letting me know. Have you checked how many alarms the iPad will allow?

Malcolm G (not verified)

27 February, 2011 - 19:06

John - iPad allows for the two transferred events; where does the randomness come into it (i.e. either 3-day or 5-day)? is it possible to force an event?

M

John M

28 February, 2011 - 01:40

The events are added to iCal with the alarms by Dates to iCal. I'm not sure what criteria the onward sync would have in which two alarms it passes to the iPad. From your message it seems random.

ro1960 (not verified)

5 May, 2011 - 22:26

Hi, I just got the latest version of Date 2 iCal. It works fine on my iMac however on my Macbok Air, I get the error reported by other users above. I have to click each error warning, quite a few, I imagine one for each occurence of a birthday and it is rather annoying.

Is there a solution for this?

Thank you.

I am running OS X 10.6.7 with iCal 4.0.4.

John M

19 May, 2011 - 00:53

Hi ro1960,

My first thought is to not run it on both machines if you are syncing to the same calendar. You will end up with duplicated events. Can you confirm the version you are using?

Peter (not verified)

11 May, 2011 - 14:36

Dear John,

I recently wanted to give your application "dates to ical 2" a try in order to get my non-local address book birthdays in ical (found your site via the Apple Communities). However, for some reason an apparently random number of my contacts were modified after running dates to ical 2 (typically one day was subtracted from the original birthday in the address book). This surprised me and left me with a very uncomfortable feeling as I don't know which of my (more than 200) birthdays are still correct...

Are you aware of this behaviour/bug? Can I do something about this?

Thanks in advance for an answer!

Regards,
Peter.

P.S. I'm using ical 4.0.4, dates to ical 2.2.3, mac os x 10.6.7. My non-local address book is on MS Exchange and I'm adding the birthday events to an existing Google calendar that is added to ical.

Peter (not verified)

12 May, 2011 - 16:51

Btw, I recently read about some bug that causes birthdays to be displayed off by one day on iphones. I seem to have the same thing going on. Could this be related? Fact is that some of my original birthdays (that I already have for many years), are actually altered recently (which i detected by using dates to ical 2).

John M

19 May, 2011 - 00:55

Hi Peter,

I've not heard about this before. If you believe Dates to iCal caused this, please submit a bug report at www.nhoj.co.uk/tracker

Thanks

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