Saturday, July 19, 2008

iPhone Annoyance #1

Having recently retired the Garmin iQue 3600 (the battery that I replaced died a quick death—I thought it would last longer than 3 months, sheesh!), one reason for buying the iPhone was its iCal calendar app. I've grown used to (somewhat dependent on) Google calendar and I use it for various on-the-go info such as flight times and numbers (when I travel), hotel addresses, and the like. I used to manually re-enter this kind of info on the calendar on the Garmin, in a somewhat redundant manner. It was a pain in the butt actually. So with the iPhone I thought hey, I should be able to access Google calendar with the phone and there'd be no need for data re-entry. And yup, that's doable, whenever I have a connection to the net. But what about when out of range of either cellular or wifi signal? I found out that Mac's iCal could "subscribe" to Google calendar, basically syncing itself whenever the Mac it was on was connected to the net. So far so good. And this works for any calendar entries one makes on Google ("in the cloud" as it were). The "upward" sync is a bit of a problem, however, since you can't get iCal to transmit its calendar entries up to Google. But for now that's ok. What I really needed was the calendar data on the iPhone. The iPhone has its own iCal app, and that is supposed to be able to sync up with the iCal app on the Mac (hey, why not with Google directly?) However, here's the glitch: for some reason it doesn't sync with these "subscribed" entries. What gives? The only thing I've been able to find thus far is this knowledgebase article on Apple's web site. It basically says "Yeah, we know". And? I guess they'll address it in the next software update (hopefully).

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