Tag Archives: MobileMe

iCloud and iOS5 calendars and notifications: what a mess

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UPDATED: Monday 31 October 2011

At first, I loved Apple's iCloud, as I explained in my blogpost iCloud: getting rid of duplicate calendar entries. 

I thought I'd solved the one apparent problem: duplicate calendar entries. But then I discovered lots of other frustrating flaws. How could Apple launch a service riddled with so many faults? 

Here are the ones I've noticed:

  • My iPad and iPhone have access to my old Mac iCal calendars. Yet there's no sign of them on the iMac itself.
  • The iCloud calendar only includes entries since 25 September. If I want anything before this I have to tick on calendars 'from my Mac' in the calendars tab (see my blogpost above) to show them. Yet this duplicates all entries since 25 September – and recurring ones before as well.
  • The notifications service duplicates calendar notifications – even when the event appears only once on the device (through having just one calendar visible). 
  • iMessages written on my iPhone don't appear on the iPad.

As I said in the earlier blogpost, I gave up on MobileMe because of the frustration of duplicate entries. It's hugely disappointing that iCloud is even worse. Didn't Apple test the damn thing before launching it? They even had four months between announcement and launch to make sure!

I still like Photostream, though…

iCloud: getting rid of duplicate calendar entries

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UPDATED 25 October 2011

I love iCloud, Apple's new way of sharing information, documents and photos wirelessly across Macs, iPhones and iPads. But when I started using it, I was frustrated to find it copied one of the worst flaws of MobileMe – duplicated calendar entries. 

A quick Google search suggested various ways of solving the problem. But I found a very simple solution myself.

IMG_3457

On an iPhone or iPad, open Calendar, and open the Calendars tab on the top left. I had 'All from my Mac' ticked as well 'as All iCloud'. Unticking All from My Mac got rid of the duplicates.

I'm now on iCloud 9!

UPDATE, 25 October

Sadly, things didn't prove quite as simple. Everything's fine on the iPhone. But on my iPad I've now got the problem Frank describes in the first comment: clicking between calendars doesn't get rid of the duplicates. Bizarrely, I now have duplicate entries of recurring calendar items. But they're not identical: they're copies of the earliest entry, duplicated for every subsequent entry.I've got duplicates of a stack of old entries on iCal on my Mac – but I can't see any way of selecting any calendar other than iCloud in iCal. 

Apple, this is a total shambles. 

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