Weird problem with iCal reminders, can anybody help?

This one’s for any of my fellow Apple users out there who have a Mac running OS X 10.7.2 (the latest update of Lion), and an iPhone or iPad running iOS 5.

I’ve got an iCloud account set up to sync reminders between my devices and my computer. This is working beautifully between my iPhone and iPad, and the reminders are also showing up in iCal on my Mac. But the problem is, on the Mac, I cannot edit them. I can’t even click a reminder to mark it as done; I have to go over to one of the iThings and do it there.

Here’s a screenshot of what I see when I try to doubleclick on one of my iCloud reminders from my Mac!

This don't make no sense
This don't make no sense

userinfospazzkat, who also has his Mac laptop and his iThings updated to the same revisions that I do, has not experienced this problem. However, the main difference I’ve been able to note between his system and mine is that he has a full MobileMe account, including an email address, that he set up to talk to iCloud. I don’t have a MobileMe account; I’ve got iCloud using my Apple ID, which is my gmail address, to log in. I would like to HOPE that this shouldn’t be causing my reminders to be showing up read-only on my Macbook, but hey, I’m QA–I know how theoretical functionality doesn’t necessarily line up with what the code is doing, even after it ships.

So what say you, fellow Mac geeks? Any of you experiencing this problem? Any of you know how to solve it?

5 Replies to “Weird problem with iCal reminders, can anybody help?”

  1. I actually use Google Calendar for my calendar functionality; I use BusyCal (which is basically iCal on steroids) on the desktop side, and then I have my Gmail account added on the iPhone and iPad, which gives me access to the Google Calendars natively. Changes on either the desktop via BusyCal or on the devices via the native calendar app go to Google Calendar, and thus mirror to the others.

    1. I’m not looking to jump to a third-party app right now; if at all possible, I’d like to actually fix the specific problem I’m having. If I can address that, then the functionality provided out of the box by Apple should do what I want it to do. *^_^*;;

      Thanks though!

      1. Well, in fairness, iCal now supports Google Calendar under Lion too. :)

        What I meant more specifically (before getting derailed) was that I wonder if the problem might be that there’s no formal backing store — no central, authoritative calendar — and maybe that’s why it comes up read only. Since I use Google Calendar as my backing store, and spazzkat uses MobileMe as his, we each have a single central ‘authoritative’ source from which all others derive. I’d think that your computer SHOULD be able to function that way — by design and according to documentation, it’s supposed to be able to work that way — but I wonder if this isn’t a bug and that’s not where it crops up.

        The other thing… I did notice my calendars were mucked up on my iPhone (I was missing a few of them) when I first did the iOS 5 upgrade. I did a clean install, and the calendars worked fine after that when I re-added the accounts. I wonder if there’s something in the iOS 4 -> 5 upgrade that can muck up the calendar storage…

        1. All of this sounds plausible. I do have enough of an iCloud account now that iCal SHOULD in theory deal, but as you and I both know, theory doesn’t necessarily mean much sometimes when it comes to brand new code!

  2. I should note that since BusyCal uses the OS X calendar APIs, anything that theoretically integrates with iCal’s data store also integrates with BusyCal. So Fantastical and other such tools still work properly.

    This is one of the nicer things about Apple /having/ a system-wide calendar and events data API; third party apps can Just Work the same way.

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