iCal calendar subscriptions: Apple’s ‘Staff Picks’

Posted by Pierre Igot in: Macintosh
January 17th, 2008 • 4:01 pm

Today I attempted to subscribe to the DVD New Release Calendar that is available for free through Apple’s web site for calendar subscriptions.

I just clicked on the download icon, and, instead of actually downloading a file to my Downloads folder, Mac OS X just switched me to iCal and invited me to confirm that I wanted to subscribe to the calendar with the following URL:

webcal://ical.mac.com/ical/DVDs.ics

I said yes and checked the option to automatically refresh it every week, and then iCal added a new calendar under “SUBSCRIPTIONS” on the left-hand side in the iCal window.

The trouble is that, as far as I can tell, this calendar is completely empty. I keep asking iCal to refresh it manually, and nothing shows up.

When I saw this, I figured that maybe there was a glitch with this particular calendar, so I went back to the web site looking for another calendar to subscribe to. The calendar subscriptions available through the Apple web site are listed from the most recently added by default, but there is also a “Staff picks” category. So I clicked on that. And here’s what I saw:

'Staff picks

Hello? Is anybody home?

If these are Apple’s “staff picks,” then I guess it’s no real surprise that the DVD New Release calendar is empty…

Needless to say, all this amounts to a rather disappointing experience. If I were an average Mac user fooling around with iCal for the first time, I would be distinctly less than impressed. Is this Apple’s idea of an Internet-ready OS? Is this a reflection of how much Apple actually cares about web services (including its own .Mac service), since the DVD New Release calendar subscription is stored in a subdomain of the mac.com domain, after all?

Me, I guess I’ll just keep using other means of staying informed of the latest DVD releases…


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