Betalogue

Apart from the several user interface improvements and feature enhancements in the latest version of iCal (although more work still needs to be done in that department), it’s good to see that small, yet significant bugs have been fixed as well.

For example, in previous versions of iCal, if you had set an alarm to go off at, say, 10:00 am on Sunday, and your computer happened to be in deep sleep at the time the alarm was supposed to go off (because you ended up sleeping in and didn’t wake your computer from sleep until later), then nothing would happen. iCal wouldn’t notify you at all regarding the event that the alarm was supposed to remind you of. It was as if the alarm had not existed.

Now, in iCal 1.5, the computer does not automatically wake up from deep sleep at the time of the alarm, but when you wake the computer up later on, the alarm that was supposed to go off at 10:00 am does pop up and remind you of the event, even though the time of the alarm is already in the past.

That’s obviously a good thing, because it is always possible that the computer will be in deep sleep or shut down at the time an alarm was supposed to go off. And reminding the user of the event too late is much better than not reminding him at all.

The user should still be given the option to force the computer to wake up when the alarm is supposed to ring, but I realize that there might be intrinsic limitations in the deep sleep mode that would prevent that from working.

It’s nice to see that Apple has fixed bugs that were obviously preventing some users from using iCal for serious business.

This entry was posted by Pierre Igot on Wednesday, October 15th, 2003 at 5:01 pm and is filed under Macintosh. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.