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Nov 6

5:11 pm

∞

MobileMe Calendar Upgrade

I didn’t realize that you actually have to log in to me.com to upgrade the MobileMe calendar, so I’ve been loping along with the old calendar for too long. The upgrade process had a few hair-raising moments, like the “add these 782 calendar items?” sync alert and the “you’ve got a lot of calendar events, so you’ll get the old ones back when we’ve finished your upgrade, later” message. All seems well after the upgrade, but Apple’s cloud services still make me nervous.

I can’t speak for any noticeable sync speed improvements, but the new MobileMe calendar infrastructure can sync other CalDAV and HTTP iCal subscriptions, which greatly simplifies my calendar setup across the Macs and iOS devices.

There are a few gotchas to be aware of before doing to MobileMe calendar upgrade and, while these issues won’t become roadblocks for everybody, this upgrade is not click-and-forget. The major MobileMe calendar upgrade issue are:

  • [OSX] Lack of full support for OSX 10.5 and earlier
  • [OSX] Lack of support from 3rd-party applications
  • [OSX] Previously published (not machine-specific) calendars must be merged into MobileMe calendars
  • [iOS] iOS 4+ required (or local MobileMe calendar must be changed to a CalDAV calendar), which rules out non-development iPads

Since I hardly ever log in to me.com, I hadn’t noticed the iOS-like interface change before today. iOS is definitely Apple’s new “thing,” in case there was any doubt.