Tuesday, January 13, 2009

iPhone Calendar Alerts and Synching

Ok some weird behavior has come up in reference to round-robin syncing between Google, Outlook, and the iPhone (Outlook <-> Google over gSyncIt and Google <-> iPhone over Nuevasync). The problem is that calender event reminders (also called alerts) are lost. Even the parts I can get working have hard caveats - for instance the iPhone 3G has an upper limit of two days, whereas I prefer two weeks for Birthdays.

What I have decided to do after testing out many scenarios, is to leave all calendar event reminders blank by default. This is because it turns out that empty alerts cause Google calendar to use the default alerting mechanism (set in properties) - which I have set to an email one week beforehand. The nice thing about the email is I tend to miss the iPhone alerts because they are so minimal, and the Outlook alerts just pile up and bug me. This is a nice middleground - emails I can respond to when I feel like it, but am unlikely to miss.


Now, for any events I create less than one week before their appointment date/time, I will put in a reminder of two days (or less). I think more testing will be required to get this working reliably - but I think we are on the way to a workable solution.

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