Calendar subscription problems and limitations with MobileMe

Several users are experiencing troubles with Apple's new MobileMe "push" technology for iCal calendars and events. These include broken links for subscribed calendars (those hosted by Apple) which may give various "service unavailable" errors.

The fix for these issues has been to manually edit the subscribed calendar's URL to have the fully qualified domain name be "ical.me.com" instead of "ical.mac.com". To do this, right-click the calendar in the left-hand panel (should be listed under "Subscriptions") and select "Change URL". Then change the ".mac" to ".me" and the calendar should get updated. You may also need to change this setting for for published calendars.

Beyond URL problems, MobileMe does not support pushing subscribed calendars to other devices such as iPhones. It appears that MobileMe only works with locally defined calendars, so the workaround users have found is to manually convert subscribed calendars to local ones. The following procedure will convert a subscribed calendar to a local one:

• Select the desired calendar subscription in the left-hand panel.
• From the File menu select "Export", save the calendar to a temporary location.
• Re-import the calendar using the "Import" option.

Users then have the option to delete or keep the original calendar subscription, which may come in handy for duplicating this process as new events are added, but on the other hand may clutter up iCal.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

Resources