Many years ago, when I either had fewer demands on my time, less of a social life, a better memory, or some combination of the three, I didn’t need to track a calendar and appointments. I was able to track everything in my head without any trouble. I don’t know if I’ve got more going on now, my travel itineraries have become more complex (hey you fly to Duluth on the first flight out of Cleveland and then drive back a few days later making stops in Milwaukee and Chicago along the way, followed by a trip to Buffalo the next week, and Sault Ste Marie MI and Detroit the week after that and tell me you can keep track of it all…) or what but I’ve become much more reliant on my calendars online, on my computer and on my phone.
Because I need to access my calendar on my computer, my iPhone, and my iPad it’s important for me to keep everything synchronized. Simple you say – your computer is a Mac and these are all Apple devices – just use iCal on your Mac and sync up your iDevices using iTunes…
But – I have not one, but 2 computers. I have a desktop (also a Mac) and my laptop which typically comes on the road with me. I need all of those things to sync their calendars up too… ”To the iCloud!” you shout, just link iCal on all the machines to iCloud and you can continue to sync the iDevices using iTunes OR thanks to IOS5 you can even sync the iDevices wirelessly to iCloud….
Unfortunately the problem is even deeper than that… iCloud is new, but the need to keep my calendar in sync between my computers and devices isn’t a new issue, and neither is the need I have to be able to share my calendar with Patricia and her devices as well as my own devices, AND access my calendar from work where they use PCs AND don’t permit access to iCloud for security reasons.
Enter Google Calendar. I can access it from anywhere and share it with Patricia… But the only way to automatically keep Google Calendar in sync with iCal (which would ensure that the calendars on my iDevices stayed in sync with everything else) was to buy a third party application. Despite the fact that Google Calendar exports calendar events in a format that iCal understands and accepts there’s no way natively for iCal to automatically fetch calendar events from Google, nor is there a way for Google to push those same events down to iCal. Amazingly that’s something that you can do on a PC with Microsoft Outlook.
But then Apple released OSX Lion and iCloud. Great! I thought. iCloud supports calendar syncing between machines, iDevices and friends and family. Finally one calendar solution to rule them all! Everything will play nice, and all the calendars can live together in a nice pretty white plastic and aluminum world with hardwood floors, right? Not quite…
For starters, iCloud is pretty skilled at creating zombie calendars – it managed to resurrect 4 old calendars that I had created and long since deleted when I was first trying to figure out how I wanted to use iCal. Not only that, but it was kind enough to populate those zombie calendars with the last several years of events and reminders, so right out of the gate I was bombarded with multiple alerts for events that had occurred months – even years ago! My calendar was now littered with invites to old events. Plus most of the events on my calendar from the last year or more and everything scheduled in the future now had as many as 6 different entries for the EXACT SAME EVENT! Oh and Patricia was flooded with invites and updates from events that had occurred in the past as well…
Then there’s the third party syncing software that is still needed to sync iCal to Google Calendar. After the mess that iCloud had made to my calendars – the syncing software freaked out. It noticed that my iCal calendar has been blown to hell and now isn’t anywhere close to what is on the Google Calendar. The changes were so dramatic that the normally calm and cool syncing software that runs quietly in background just got up, declared “Dude, you’re on your own – call me when you unscrew this mess” and walked down to the corner bar for a pint of Guiness…
I also can’t seem to convince iCal that I don’t want to see the copy of my calendar that’s up on iCloud. Since I’m syncing my local calendar with iCloud, the two calendars are the same so I don’t need to see both of them, but no matter how many times I uncheck my iCloud calendar in iCal, when I relaunch iCal there’s the iCloud calendar again.
Oh – and iCal and Google Calendar – they still don’t play with each other….
Then there’s TripIt. For keeping track of my travel itineraries TripIt rocks. TripIt allows me (albeit manually) to push my entire travel itinerary down to iCal. All the flight information, hotel reservations and details of my trip are entered as appropriate calendar events in iCal by TripIt. They even include addresses, confirmation numbers and anything else I’ll need with for the reservation in the calendar event that they create – even the times on the events are adjusted so that the reminders happen at the correct time even if I’ve changed time zones along the way!
Where the problem comes in is again – iCal. You have to manually push events from TripIt down to iCal because it won’t fetch that information itself. That’s a minor inconvenience though. If I make a change to an existing trip and push it down to iCal – iCal isn’t smart enough to recognize that this is an update to an existing event. iCal just imports the data and creates a whole new event, one with good information and one with bad forcing me to go back and clean up iCal…
This shouldn’t be so hard. All these calendars talk to each other using the same standard. With a standard for data entry and the vast amount of computing power involved here – why is there absolutely NO INTELLIGENCE used by any of these calendar applications? Why in order to keep everything in sync do I need to build a house of cards that can collapse at the slightest quiver?
