Journey to iCal Land
I’m a big fan of Google Calendar and the flexibility it provides. In particular, I like the ease in which I can create new calendars for each of my family members to help us to track our appointments. As mentioned in a previous post, I like to be able to view my personal calendars in conjunction with my professional work calendar, but keep them separate. When I existed in the Windows OS world I would use a purchased add-on by CompanionLink that allowed me to sync all my myriad of shared Google calendars as items on my Outlook in different categories. Once I transitioned to a Mac I was elated to learn how easy it was to add my primary and shared Google calendars to iCal via simply adding my Google account. Equally giddiness-inducing was that when moving to Snow Leopard I could also interface to my work’s Exchange server in both Mail and iCal.
Burned
However, I learned a hard lesson after not receiving an alarm reminder on my iPhone for one of my synced Google Calendars for which I knew I had set to remind me. it seems that there is a quirk when using iCal to view your Google calendars that you need to remember to avoid when setting alarms.
Why!? Tell Me, Why!
It seems that, if you want to set an alarm (to fire-off an alert on your iPhone and make a reminder noise) you have to set the calendar event alarm to only “Message.” If you set it to “Message with Sound” it won’t add a reminder to the even that is created on the iPhone. Now, it’s possible this has since been fixed, but I have since changed my preferences in iCal to not set a default alarm, and thus I’ve gotten into the habit of manually setting a “Message” reminder.
It’s not ideal, but it works.
Note, in this scenario the iPhone is pulling down the Google calendar events from the cloud.
The Intentional Geek 