iCal: Silly Apple Knowledge Base article

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
December 8th, 2003 • 8:43 am

Check out this Knowledge Base article. Apple seem to be quite serious when they say:

Log in to your account an hour or more before an alarm is expected. Alarms may not occur during the first hour after you turn on and log in to your computer.

Now, correct me if I am wrong, but the very point of having an alarm system is not to have to remember events. If I need to log in an hour or more before an alarm is expected, doesn’t that imply that I have to remember the event myself without the help of the alarm in the first place?

More generally, Apple seem to have some trouble grasping the very essence of what a calendar application should be able to do — i.e. remind people of their appointments. Until recently, if your computer was put into deep sleep, and if an alarm was supposed to go off while the computer was in deep sleep, the next time you woke the computer up, nothing happened. Here again, asking me not to put the computer into deep sleep when the alarm is supposed to come on amounts to asking me to remember the appointment in the first place.

Thankfully, they have now fixed this. Now, if an alarm was supposed to go off when the computer was in deep sleep mode, as soon as you wake up the computer, the alarm goes off. Of course, it might already be too late, but at least you cannot blame the computer from not trying to help you.


2 Responses to “iCal: Silly Apple Knowledge Base article”

  1. Victor Agreda, Jr. says:

    iCal’s notification is still iffy. My wife relies too much on the alarm feature, and yesterday it failed her. When set to email, it just wouldn’t if the alarm time had already passed. Then, to change the 100+ reminders I’d set (these are birthdays for a group) I had to go to EACH ONE and apply the change to beep 15 min. before. On one I forgot to change all (they’re repeating each year, naturally), and now it’s a disconnected event, and I’ll have to try to remember to change it later! There’s no way to reconnect it! But the mysterious “no alarm” thing is utterly ridiculous. That defeats the purpose of an alarm/calendar.

  2. Pierre Igot says:

    Eek. Bad news. I don’t use email notifications too much, or when I do, I always add a second alarm of a different type, so I haven’t noticed this particular problem myself. But I sympathize :-/.

    The fact that there is no facility for batch changes is a problem as well. Apple still has work to do…

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