I’ve been a Mac person all my life. I have a great contact list that used to automatically populate my calendar and send me a reminder of that person’s birthday. Then I got an iPhone. And synced it up with my Mac. Now every birthday shows twice on my phone calendar, not at all on my Mac calendar, and I cannot edit or remove the birthday entries on my phone, including setting a reminder so that I don’t miss a birthday (which I almost did today).
For this reason I want to hate this dumb phone. Mac has always been such an awesome technology-integrating brand, until this calendar conflict. I’ve tried every trick that I’ve been able to research online- still a mess.
Is there any duplication of contacts in your Address Book?
Are there any duplicate calendars when you view that list? (in either iPhone or desktop)
Have you checked your preferences? In iCal, the option to show Birthdays is in Preferences under General tab - if that is unchecked, it would at least explain the problem on your desktop. I’m pretty sure the iPhone shows it as one of the calendars when you view the calendar list.
I’m assuming that the syncing is being done through MobileMe, but is that the case? You don’t specify.
It might also help us to know some of the things you have unsuccessfully tried so that we don’t list the same options.
No duplicate calendars, although there is this “other” calendar listed that is a birthdays calendar (meaning it shows under “other” on my iPhone calendars list). The calendar itself appears once but all entries are duplicated and uneditable (can’t edit entries, can’t delete entries, can’t delete calendar).
Yes I sync through Mobile Me.
I’ve tried turning b-day calendar on and off on my mac and re-syncing, I’ve tried deleting b-day calendar on my mac an resyncing. I’ve tried deleting the calendars from my phone and resyncing my computer calendar w/ my mobile me calendar and my mobile me calendar with my phone. Basically I’ve tried every combo possible. But the only thing I can’t do is delete the b-day calendar on my phone & try to start over. It’s always there, with the duplications on all. It never goes away. :mad:
I’ve considered restoring. I have all apps backed up in iTunes. All contacts backed up too. All music, etc. I’m willing to restore and lose game scores (there’s only one I’ve spent any time playing and only for a few weeks anyway). What other kind of data can I lose? I have some data apps (like list apps & whatnot)- will data I plugged into those apps go away?
I’ll be really pissed if I restore and have the same issue. I wish I knew HOW this happened so I can try to avoid it next time. Grrr!
If you’re syncing through MobileMe and also syncing when you plug it in, you get duplicates of whatever items are being double-synced. Turn off syncing in iTunes for any items (calendar, contacts, whatever) is being synced by MobileMe.
So I need to sync my apps, photos, music with my computer, but my info (calendars, email, contacts) with mobile me, correct? And my phone automatically syncs with mobile me, and I have to manually sync mobile me with my computer (unless I set it to do otherwise). But do not sync phone with sync function in iTunes. Do I have it?
You have two problems: the duplication, and the inability to edit. If I understand this right, you have two birthday calendars.
One of these you set up yourself, and you’re pulling in data from your Contacts on your Mac, into iCal on your Mac, and syncing to your iPhone from there.
The second is the iPhone pulling ALL birthdays from your Contacts app, and putting them in your Calendar app. This is the source of duplication, and this can be solved within the Calendar app, by unselecting Other/Birthdays.
It makes sense that you can’t edit the second one–it’s just a view of some of the data from your contacts, and to change it, you need to change the contact.
As for the first, depending on how you get the data into iCal, you should be able to edit it like any other calendar. Which is to say, some you can, and some you can’t. You’ll need to change the setting for this calendar in iCal.
Well the calendar on my computer (iCal) is pulling the birthdays from the contacts on my computer. Before I got this phone, I synced my computer w/ my MobileMe account to back it up. These birthdays I could set a reminder for.
Now I have the iPhone and realize I was syncing my phone with my computer calendar and also with my Mobile Me calendar, which caused the duplication (although none of the other entries were duplicated). Once the duplicates were on my phone, if I turned off the birthday calendar, both entries went away. But neither were editable.
So…I turned off syncing with my computer and set the phone to sync with my Mobile Me only. And the duplicate birthday went away. Yay! BUT…I still can’t edit it to set a reminder.
I don’t think there’s anything I can do about the lack of reminders. Neither entry was editable, even the one that came from my editable iCal calendar.
p.s. whoa- the iCal birthdays aren’t editable either!!! WTF. Well, I must have been able to set b-day reminders on my Blackberry. I know I did it somewhere. iPhone needs that…bad.
