The story on the MobileMe calendar update
On October 14, Apple released an update to the MobileMe calendar that changes how iCal communicates with MobileMe. In the process, they removed synchronization between iCal and Sync Services. The result is that after the update, Life Balance no longer synchronizes to iCal.
We got caught a little off-guard by this change because Apple doesn't seem to have documented it anywhere. Apple's documentation for Sync Services hasn't been updated since February. Our question on the Apple Developer Forums has gone unanswered. While Apple has provided a list of known issues with the calendar update, it doesn't include any guidance for developers on how to work around the problems. The best information we've been able to find about the transition is from BusyMac and TidBITS.
Nevertheless, it seems that Apple is dropping support for Sync Services and wants us to use the Calendar Store APIs or CalDAV instead. We're intending to do both. Supporting the Calendar Store APIs will allow us to sync directly with iCal. Supporting CalDAV directly from within Life Balance will have the additional advantage that we'll be able to sync directly to Google Calendar from iOS, Mac, and Windows.
It will take us some time to get there. If you currently rely on the iCal sync feature of Life Balance, we recommend that you postpone installing the MobileMe calendar update. If you've already installed the update, you might consider downgrading back to the old version until we have the new iCal support in place.
We'll post more information once we have new synchronization features in place.
Comments
Just wanted to comment that
Just wanted to comment that you don't necessarily need to downgrade your MobileMe calendar in order to continue syncing with LB.
I re-created my LB calendars as local calendars on my Mac and reset LB's sync. The syncing still works fine.
The down side of this is those calendars no longer sync over MobileMe.
Success!
Thank you for posting this suggestion. After a little troubleshooting my LB is now syncing again with iCal locally and I couldn't be happier with the reclaimed functionality.
I didn't realize I was having iCal syncing problems until I tried to sync with Life Balance again. It turns out I had some old deleted calendars that never got removed from a cache file somewhere. I tried resetting LB syncing, my iCal cache, and even the drastic step of removing SyncServices cache files and reslamming from MobileMe in an effort to clear these ghost entries. Multiple application quits, logged out, rebooted... blech.. nothing. It turns out that my company recently turned off split-tunnel functionality in our VPN software. I don't keep the VPN up all the time now and when Exchange calendar syncing times out in iCal it keeps iCal from properly functioning... either that or the Exchange config somehow corrupted my iCal setup. Anyway, I deleted the Exchange calendars and BAM! all the ghost calendars appeared in my local calendar list almost instantly. I started LB, picked the calendar I wanted, then did a manual sync and in seconds everything was back to normal. I deleted the old calendars next and tested a new LB entry on automatic syncing. Works like before the mobileme updates.
Maybe there is debug info somewhere but iCal really left me hanging on what was going on in the background and subsequently kept several apps from properly syncing. The indication that I had a problem was all the old calendars in LB ical sync setup and itunes sync setup. But I never look at those because I had not added or deleted calendars in a long time and prior to the mobileme conversion LB was working without fail.
Not so lucky
I tried this but my 'on my mac' calendars do not refresh inside life balance's 'unsynchronized ical calendars." My recreated local calendar doesn't show up as an available sync calendar. I thought this was part of the initial problem state due to the mobileme changes but on further inspection iTunes cannot see the recreated calendar or any new local calendar for that matter either.
It looks like my iCal needs to TLC.
Forced MobileMe upgrade soon
Each time I log into MobileMe now, it's telling me the old version will be discontinued very soon. Is there any more current advice on how to handle this? Is Mike Greiner's comment from 11/05/2010 the thing to try? Anything I should do before doing the MobileMe upgrade?
What's the status of calendar sync?
With the old calendar format going away is there any news? I have never synced calendars, and just when I was trying to set that up, this change stopped me from doing it. I need MobileMe sync more than I need LB calendar sync, and I would like both.
Ultimately I would hope that you would use iCloud for syncing everything from LB, Wi-Fi sync is a pain. But I understand the potential complexities. And Calendar sync is a different issue from iPhone/desktop syncing.