Working with Calendars and Reminders in iCloud
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
One of the best—and incredibly useful—features of iCloud is its ability to keep your calendar events and reminders in the cloud, automatically synchronizing them among all your devices. Imagine you’ve just finished an appointment at the dentist, and the receptionist asks to set up your next date. Whipping out your iPhone, you enter the next appointment into the Calendar app, and in a moment, that appointment appears on the rest of your devices.
Similarly, iCloud can create synchronized reminders for things you need to do. With the iOS Reminders app, you can even set a reminder to appear only when you arrive at a particular geographical location.
But probably the most useful feature of iCloud calendaring is that you can share your calendars with family, friends, and colleagues. So when your daughter adds her soccer practice to the family shared calendar, it appears on the rest of the family’s schedule as well.
Setting up Calendars
You begin with calendars in iCloud by creating them, in either the Mac or iOS Calendar app (beginning in OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion, iCal’s name was changed to Calendar to bring it in line with the iOS equivalent). You can also create calendars on the iCloud website 
, which I’ll discuss later in this chapter.
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The Calendar application on the iCloud website has a variety of calendar views.
There’s one important concept to get when you start managing your schedule and to-dos with iCloud. There are two kinds of items that iCloud deals with:
- Events are items that appear in the body of your calendar views. They will appear in the Day, Week, Month, and List views. They always have dates and times associated with them (though sometimes the associated time is “all-day”).
- Reminders are to-do items. They work differently than they did with MobileMe and the former iCal, in that you work with them in the Mac and iOS Reminders apps, rather than with the Calendar app. Reminders don’t appear in the calendar views. Reminders may have a date and time associated with them, but don’t have to. Unlike Events, you can also set a Priority (None, Low, Medium, High) for a Reminder. Using a feature called “geofencing,” they can also be set to trigger on your iOS device when the device is physically near a location, using your device’s GPS and Location Services. Even cooler, geofencing can be set to trigger the reminder when you arrive at or leave a particular location. So that’s how the Siri personal assistant built into the iPhone 4S and later can deal with commands like “Text my wife when I leave the office.”
In this book, I’m focusing on iCloud, rather than working with the Mac or iOS Calendar app, so I’ll deal mostly with working with events on the iCloud website, rather than in the Mac or iOS programs. However, because Reminders are so intimately connected with iCloud, I’ll be going into detail with the iOS Reminders app in the “Working with Reminders on Your iOS Device” section, later in this chapter, and there’s a similar section about working with the Mac Reminders app, in the “Working with Reminders on the Mac” section. Mountain Lion brought changes to how notifications work, so I’ve also added the “Managing Notifications on Mac and iOS” section in this edition of the book.
The Only Good Calendar... Is Online?
Beginning with the introduction of Mountain Lion, the default (and apparently only) choice when it comes to creating calendars is to share them with an online service. This is a change from previous versions of iCal on the Mac; before, you could easily have both shared online calendars and private calendars that only existed on your Mac. It’s as though Apple has decided that unshared, private calendars are something to be avoided. I don’t quite understand why; I can easily imagine many scenarios in which you might have calendars you only want to appear on your office machine, for events that only occur in the office, and that don’t need to be shared with your iOS devices.
Besides iCloud, Calendar on the Mac makes it easy to create shared calendars with Google, Yahoo, Exchange, and any server that uses the CalDAV protocol. To create a new calendar on any of these services, you must first create the service in Calendar's Preferences, in the Accounts pane 
. Once there, click the Plus button at the bottom of the Accounts list, then pick the kind of account you want from the Add an Account sheet 
. Enter the email address and password for the service, then click Create.
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You create new shared calendar accounts in the Accounts pane of Calendar's Preferences.
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It’s actually possible to create a new calendar that is only on your Mac, but it needs a little work around to set up. To do so, you need to open the Accounts pane of Calendar's Preferences, and select your iCloud account in the list 
. If you uncheck the Enable this account checkbox, all of your iCloud calendars and events will disappear from Calendar on your Mac (don't worry, all the information is still safe on iCloud). Then choose File > New Calendar, and give it a name that isn’t the same as any of your iCloud calendars. The new calendar will be created in a section of the calendar list that says On My Mac. Then reenable your iCloud account, and the iCloud calendar and your private calendar will happily coexist on your computer.
To create a calendar on a Mac
- Launch Calendar
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On the Mac, Calendar for OS X has a faux-leather look that people either love or hate. - Choose File > New Calendar > then either iCloud or the name of another shared calendar service, or On My Mac.
Choosing iCloud will place the calendar on iCloud, where it can be shared by your other devices and by other people. Calendars on other services are shareable according to the particular rules of those services (check with your system administrator). If the calendar is on your Mac, it will be private and will only exist on the Mac where you created the calendar.
- The new calendar appears in the Calendars List as Untitled, allowing you to name it
. Enter the name, then click anywhere else to save it.
Begin creating your new calendar in the Calendars list.
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To create a calendar on an iOS device
- On your iPhone or iPad, start the Calendar app.
- Tap the Calendars button.
- The Calendars (iPhone) or Show Calendars (iPad) popover appears
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On the iPad, the Show Calendars popover tells you the status of all your iCloud calendars. - Tap the Edit button.
The screen name changes to Edit Calendars.
- At the bottom of the iCloud section, tap Add Calendar.
- In the resulting Add Calendar popover
, type the name you want for the new calendar.
- Tap next to the color you want the calendar events to appear as.
You may be able to see additional colors by scrolling.
- Tap Done.
The popover will go back to the Edit Calendars screen, and the new calendar you created appears in the list.
- Tap Done.
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To edit a calendar on a Mac
- In Calendar, in the Calendars List at the upper left corner of the window, right-click the calendar you want to change, and choose Get Info.
The info dialog appears for that calendar
. - Do one or more of the following:
- Change the name of the calendar.
- From the color pop-up menu next to the Name field, choose the color in which you want the calendar’s events to appear. One difference in Calendar versus the Calendar app on iOS is that one of the color choices is Other, which when chosen brings up a color picker that allows you to choose any color you want, rather than a preset color.
- Click OK.
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To edit a calendar on an iOS device
- On your iPhone or iPad, start the Calendar app.
- Tap the Calendars button.
The Calendars (iPhone) or Show Calendars (iPad) popover appears
. - Tap the Edit button.
The screen name changes to Edit Calendars.
- In the Calendar list, tap the name of an existing calendar.
- In the Edit Calendar screen, change the name or the associated color of the calendar, then tap Done.
Using Alternative Calendar Programs with iCloud
Just because Calendar comes with OS X, that doesn’t mean that it’s universally beloved, or even especially liked, by people who are heavy calendar users. For those people (like me) who have been using calendars on a computer for a very long time, and have used excellent calendar programs over the years, Calendar is too limited, too lowest-common-denominator, for our comfort. The trouble is that all of the really useful calendar features (event synchronization between devices, calendar sharing between people) use Calendar (or at least its data file) and iCloud as a conduit.
Happily, if Calendar isn’t feature-rich enough for your needs, a variety of alternative calendar programs still use the Calendar events and reminders data and provide a superior calendaring experience. My favorite for Mac is BusyMac’s BusyCal 
, which allows you to share events and to-dos over iCloud or Google Calendar; gives you much more flexibility in calendar views; has easier event entry than Calendar; has a wide variety of event types, such as all-day banners, sticky notes in the calendar, and graphics; and much more.
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I prefer to use BusyCal over Calendar, because it shows me more information at a glance, such as the mini-months, the reminders list, and the detail for the selected event.
On iOS, there are many alternatives for the Calendar app, but the ones I’ve used are called Fantastical from Flexibits, and Calvetica , from Mysterious Trousers. I like Calvetica because of its minimalist design, and because it requires just a couple of taps (and the text entry for the event name, of course) to enter an event, far fewer than Calendar. It’s fast, lets you create an event quickly, and gets out of your way. One really attractive thing about Fantastical is that it understands natural-language requests, so you can simply enter “Lunch next Tuesday at 2 with Cliff” and the program correctly parses the sentence creates the calendar event. This is terrific when combined with dictation on iOS 6.
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On iOS, the faster you can enter an event the better, which is why I prefer Calvetica, rather than the stock Calendar app.