iCloud calendar sync problems

[daveproctor]

Before 'upgrading' to iCloud I was happily syncing my Blackberry 9900 with iCal which in turn synced with my MobileMe account. Seems now that iCloud has launched this is not possible.

My contacts still sync fine as I do this with Mac Address book and Gmail

I have Outlook 2011 for Mac but can't seem to set up a sync with this and my Blackberry

Any suggestions as I REALLY need to find some way of syncing my Blackberry calendar to my Mac desktop. If this could then sync with iCloud it would be great but not a major issue if this is not possible

[magicwiz10]

ive had a blackberry for years, now with icloud I cant sync my calender, and if i delete it from icloud it says I will lose everything on my calender (locally). Any ideas anyone?

[Rico131968]

Same problem for me, no more sync since icloud. Everything was just fine before....

[jasonvw]

Originally Posted by daveproctor

Before 'upgrading' to iCloud I was happily syncing my Blackberry 9900 with iCal which in turn synced with my MobileMe account. Seems now that iCloud has launched this is not possible.

My contacts still sync fine as I do this with Mac Address book and Gmail

I have Outlook 2011 for Mac but can't seem to set up a sync with this and my Blackberry

Any suggestions as I REALLY need to find some way of syncing my Blackberry calendar to my Mac desktop. If this could then sync with iCloud it would be great but not a major issue if this is not possible

Right now there doesn't appear to be a great way to sync bb with iCloud. You can however sync with ical on your mac with desktop manager. You'll need to create a new local calendar in ical. Just open it up, go to file, new calendar, on my mac. Open DM and choose this calendar as the one to sync. Then if you wanted you could export the calendar and import it to ical.

I think theres an app in the mac app store that lets you group calendars including iCloud that should make things easier, but its like $50.

Could also create a google account and sync with google calendar. You'd then have OTA syncing.

[jasonvw]

Originally Posted by magicwiz10

ive had a blackberry for years, now with icloud I cant sync my calender, and if i delete it from icloud it says I will lose everything on my calender (locally). Any ideas anyone?

Export the calendar so you have a backup, can always import it back later or into a new calendar.

[GizmoJeff]

Just my 2 cents here, but BusyCal is hands down the best Calendar app and make iCal look like trash. Just like the other folks have said though, you will need to create local calendars to sync, this has caused problems with a host of other Applications (OmniFocus was one I used that this borked all up.) Busy cal makes it easy to publish the Mobile Me calendars to you Gmail calendar.

I recommend it highly and you can check it out in the App store.

Cheers

[eb1of9]

daveproctor, did you ever figure out how to sync icloud with your b'berry via the desktop software? i'm having the same problem

[chenzo76]

Since Os5 and ICloud came out I have had nothing but problems myself....

[CanadianThomas]

I couldn't sync with iCloud using an iPhone 3G running iOS 4.x.x

Apple has done something to lock down iCloud. They are starting to get annoying with crap like this. I'm an Apple tech, I have now started to look into this. If I find a solution I will post it ASAP.

[Keri82]

Hi,
Yes, I am also having problems syncing my BB 9300 Curve to Mac iCal since iCloud. I have looked through various forums and tried their suggestions but still having error message when trying to sync on Desktop Manager.

I tried to export iCal (the calendar that iCloud had), then created a new calendar with the name HOME, then deactivated the iCloud calendar and imported the saved one.

I have contacted Apple Care today but they say it will be the 3rd party we need to contact for advice regarding compatibility with iCloud.

If anyone has any solutions or has found something to work - looking forward to hearing it!!
If I had known all this, I wouldn't have activated iCloud in the first place!!!

[PHughes]

I still cannot see the point in having two devices in the same room and having to go out to the Internet to sync the two. I also do not see the draw of having personal information stored out on someone else's server. I wish more people thought this way so developers would continue to upgrade their sync capabilities between devices without the need to upload information to the Internet first. So many people use Google for this purpose and yet Google has been a horrible abuser of privacy in the past and has been hacked repeatedly.

[hosheit]

All you need to do is make sure that you still have "Calendar" in your personal folders. In other words, you'll have two calendars, one in iCloud and one in personal folders

[lcwright1964]

As part of the transition to iCloud from MobileMe, Calendar ended up on the cloud first. This happened last year sometime--can't remember when. What happened, if I remember, is that the MobileMe version of my calendars in iCal were no longer writable during a Desktop Manager sync. Changes to my handheld would not be written to iCal, sent to the cloud, and show up in iCal on my other Mac, though changes in iCal would go to the handheld as before. The only solution I came up with to keep my iMac, MacBook, and BB calendars in sync was to invest in BusySync, which works like a charm. Regrettably, BusySync doesn't sync with iCloud but it works perfectly with Google Calendars. So I can keep both iCals in sync directly over a shared Wi-Fi connection or via my Google intermediary. I really like the LOOK of the calendar in iCal, but I don't use it as my web-based calendar.

The OP hasn't mentioned Address Book syncing, but that worked perfectly over MobileMe right up until the transition to iCloud. Now, I have similar problems as I did with iCal. My problem is that Contacts on my handheld will only sync with the On This Mac Address Book, not the iCloud Address book. I gave up trouble shooting pretty quickly and and use Google Contacts as my intermediary (you can do this right in Address Book preferences). The only problem with this is that once my desktop address book is synchronized to Google, my categories (Personal, Work, School, Family, etc.) are not preserved on Google, so when the MacBook downloads the contacts from Google the categorization is not preserved. That's a bummer, but at least my 300 contacts themselves are preserved on each computer. But again it's a shame--the web based iCloud address book is MUCH nicer to look at than Google's.

One thing I should try is to export my Address Book with categories intact to an ABBU file, load it on both computers into Address Book, set up syncing with Google on both machines, and see if the categories get lost again on one or the other machine.

[rob7100g]

I too dislike how Google scrambles formatting with Contacts. I now use a Yahoo! Mail address to sync contacts and it more faithfully renders addresses. FWIW I delete the mail and calendar services books only keeping the Yahoo sync one.

[lcwright1964]

Originally Posted by rob7100g

I too dislike how Google scrambles formatting with Contacts. I now use a Yahoo! Mail address to sync contacts and it more faithfully renders addresses.

Thanks. It so happens that my main web-based email account is Yahoo account, so this is probably better. I am one of those folks who wants to use my @[provider].blackberry.net alias as my main "mail from" address on the Blackberry. Yahoo accounts permit this without hassle but GMail does not (even though one can send from another account without problem within GMail online). Too bad. Like many, I prefer the GMail web interface and would rather use it, but this addressing limitation has kept me with Yahoo primarily during my 4 years with a BB. (FWIW, I have searched CB and the web for workarounds on this and haven't found any. Looks like if one uses GMail on the BB, one is stuck with the primary @gmail.com as the "sent from" address on the handheld, even if one has another address set up on the account online.)

So I will make my back-ups and experiment with Yahoo for contacts and see if I like it. But using Google as my web-based calendar stays put--BusySync does not have provisions to sync with Yahoo calendars. Maybe they will soon.