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no birthdays on iPhone! --> Apple = laughable!

randfee2

randfee2

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jun 13, 2007
272
241
Germany
For a year now I've been annoyed that my birthday calendar, while being synchronized to mobile me and visible there, never appeared on my iPhone. I looked for it twice but couldn't find it. Because I had other stuff to do I never got around properly investigating why it isn't showing up!

Today, I got annoyed again, and requested a support chat. Go and read it yourself!

Untitled-20090616-220809.jpg



unbelievable! Something so rudimentary... left out!
I guess the compass used up all resources, rofl!

lmao! ... no, about to riot!
80 bucks a year for a halfhearted project. People that don't use Mobile.Me CAN HAVE BIRTHDAYS, people paying the 80bucks can't. I'm mad alright!!

Apple makes great stuff, but sometimes they just suck.

LAUGHABLE, APPLE!
 
Incompetent because they don't sync a birthday calendar?!?

Really?

Slightly overstated, ya?

I'd also like to add... 1 Apple Tech, the lowest of the low on the totem pole, does not necessarily make the best source of information.
 
Never noticed this because Outlook creates an appointment for peoples birthdays, but it's certainly something that would be helpful if I didn't have an Exchange account.
 
That is odd as mine shows my birthday calendar. Are you putting the birthdays in manually or are you using the birthday field in the address book?
 
This is why I use Google Sync, but I'm sure you're probably doing something wrong in iCal, because there's no reason it wouldn't work.
 
If I had a birthday calendar app I couldn't delete I would kill myself. Why can't you just put the birthdays on the regular calendar big guy?
 
lol i actually found this post funny. dont know if it meant to be that way?
 
yellow said:
Incompetent because they don't sync a birthday calendar?!?

Really?

Slightly overstated, ya?
Click to expand...

incompetent because they didn't come up with an ordinary synch. They must have come accross it but dropped it because it might have meant 200 more lines of code.

Don't get me wrong here, I normally just ignore crap like that but this is just sad. As mentioned, if I weren't using mobile me, I could have the birthday calendar synchronized via iTunes. So I pay and get less ... funny!

sorry for the outrage!
 
I never had a problem adding birthdays whether I was using Mail or Entourage. Plus couldn’t you just add these birthdays in as reoccurring events in the calendar and then voila, it would sync back to your mac. :rolleyes:
 
diamond.g said:
That is odd as mine shows my birthday calendar. Are you putting the birthdays in manually or are you using the birthday field in the address book?
Click to expand...

do you use Mobile me to sync everything? If so, please contact me, I'll buy you a beer. I doubt it though. I just tried it here. The birthday calendar CAN synch to the iPhone IF you let iTunes sync it. If you use MobileMe for synchronizing everything, it won't work!

lame!
 
randfee2 said:
incompetent because they didn't come up with an ordinary synch. They must have come accross it but dropped it because it might have meant 200 more lines of code.
Click to expand...

The problem is that I could come up with a list of another 2,000 things the iPhone doesn't do. What makes 'birthdays' more important than any of those things? They have to choose what features to put in every year. They decided that adding more APIs was the task for 2009, and I agree with them that it's the more important task at the moment.

They have to prioritize. Either that or hire another few thousand people to work on the iPhone and charge $2,399 per iPhone to pay for them all.

Is that your solution?
 
of course the company does not have to focus on that. It is a tiny feature.
The thing is though that no programmer in the world would have finished the calendar sync like that! Why sync everything else but not the birthday calendar? Its not like the iPhone does not synchronize birthdays, they're in your contacts! The same algorithm used in iCals desktop version to generate the birthday calendar from the addressbook info could have been used. Some lines of code.

You make it sound like I'm asking for the whole company to switch focus to the birthday calendar or change its long-term strategy, lol!

whatever....
 
jrotunda85 said:
I never had a problem adding birthdays whether I was using Mail or Entourage. Plus couldn’t you just add these birthdays in as reoccurring events in the calendar and then voila, it would sync back to your mac. :rolleyes:
Click to expand...

The Birthday Calendar in iCal is a "special" calendar that automatically pulls birthdays from Address Book contacts. It's incredibly useful because you only have to keep birthdays in a single place and where they should be (i.e. against the person themselves), and iCal takes care of the rest. The problem the OP has (and I share his frustration to a certain extent) is that this calendar does not sync over the air so you lose the benefit of this very useful function.
 
randfee2 said:
You make it sound like I'm asking for the whole company to switch focus to the birthday calendar or change its long-term strategy, lol!

whatever....
Click to expand...

It's like littering on the freeway.

You ask "what harm does one paper cup do?" Well, by itself, nothing. But you can't argue that one paper cup is ok without EVERYONE throwing cups out of their car windows. Suddenly you have millions of cups on the side of the road.

You want your one little feature done. It will only take an hour. Ok, well now Apple has "1 little feature request" from a million other people too. Assuming they each take 1 hour, to get that done in a year you'd need to add another 500 programers. That's anothe $70 million in costs for the company for the year, just for these little features.

They HAVE to cut things out, even if they seem small and reasonable, or new iPhones would never ship.

Look, I want this feature too, but I just undertand that I can't have everything all at once. Look at the Mac. It's over 25 years old and they're still adding features every year!
 
Of all the things that the iPhone doesn't do, this is what has you upset the most?

I don't use birthdays in iCal, but can't you just make your own calendar called Birthdays, add people's birthdays to it and sync that?
 
randfee2 said:
incompetent because they didn't come up with an ordinary synch. They must have come accross it but dropped it because it might have meant 200 more lines of code.
Click to expand...
Sync (and MobileMe) have nothing to do with the problem.

When you enable "Show Birthdays Calendar" in either iCal.app (on your Mac) or the calendar area of MobileMe, it generates the Birthdays Calendar on the fly. It's not actually created like a regular calendar, so it can't be synced. Have you noticed how you can't edit it directly, nor can you make any changes, like .. say .. add any alarm?

So, yeah, it would be cool if Apple added a "Show Birthdays Calendar" feature to the iPhone, but it'd be an addition of functionality to the calendar app on the iPhone ... nothing to do with MobileMe or synching. MobileMe already syncs the birthday field in your contacts. That's all it needs to do.

Until then, there are App Store apps that you can put on your iPhone that show you upcoming birthdays, or you can find AppleScripts that will create you a proper iCal birthday calendar... that's editable, has alarms, and since it's a proper calendar, it can be synced.
 
Small White Car said:
They HAVE to cut things out, even if they seem small and reasonable, or new iPhones would never ship.
Click to expand...

that much is obvious, but if you know a "bit" about ical/caldav usage you should know, that this would be WAY easy to include. The calendar is there, its on MobileMe which syncs all the time!!! Just push that one too. It seems like having been arbitrarily left out.


yg17 said:
Of all the things that the iPhone doesn't do, this is what has you upset the most?
I don't use birthdays in iCal, but can't you just make your own calendar called Birthdays, add people's birthdays to it and sync that?
Click to expand...
No, the worst is that I can't just send contacts via Bluetooth like any other phone :). Besides that, why would I have to create another calendar if the birthday one is already there? I'm not the computers servant!

aristobrat said:
Sync (and MobileMe) have nothing to do with the problem.
When you enable "Show Birthdays Calendar" in either iCal.app (on your Mac) or the calendar area of MobileMe, it generates the Birthdays Calendar on the fly. It's not actually created like a regular calendar, so it can't be synced. Have you noticed how you can't edit it directly, nor can you make any changes, like .. say .. add any alarm?
Click to expand...

I know that and said so. Even if one couldn't just apply the same algorithm to iPhones iCal, one could perfectly easy transcode the mobileMe version of the birthday calendar that is being shown there into an ordinary one copied down to iphone. Its a standard format that doesn't need much tampering!
 
I hate to say this, but your iPhone has nothing to do with your complaint. The iPhone is designed to be cloud based; that being said, it's dependent upon what your calendar/contact storage service is.

This is already a common complaint with Gmail. :)
 
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