Calendar Application Has Its Own Agenda!

[PGB1]

Hello All!

For the last few weeks, the Calendar application on my El Capitan 10.11.6 machine has gone quite haywire and I am writing to ask, before I try it and goof thing up royally, if my idea (below) may help.

Here is what is happening-
Some event notifications never arrive. Some come up over and over within minutes of the last time, even though I may click to "snooze" for 1 hour, 1 day (or other).
I can even tell Preferences not to give notifications, but it does.
Most e-mail notifications don't arrive any more. Many events will pop a notification days or even weeks ahead of time and then keep popping up notifications.
Mail will also ask me, on occasion- not always- which server to use when Calendar tries to send a notification e-mail reminder.

I've tried re-indexing Spotlight (heard about that here for other Calendar problems), taking away all events and manually starting over, switching which mail account Calendar uses by changing who is "Me" in address book. (Calendar refused to switch. Still using the same one).

So, my idea was to write down all the events and discard the P-List file. Then re-start the computer and begin anew. Will that cause more harm than good? Or, is there a better plan to get Calendar Application back on Team Cooperation?

And, if I may sneak in another question- When creating an event, the default Start Time is 9:00am. I would like it to be 5:00am. I changed, in Preferences, the default to 5, but when I make a new event, Calendar still makes it 9:00. Is this time changeable?

And, still another question if I may be greedy, in Preferences there is a box to mark that says "Show Found In Mail Calendar". What is "Found"?

Thank You All Very Much for your thoughts & ideas! They are appreciated.

Paul

 

[pm-r]

And, still another question if I may be greedy, in Preferences there is a box to mark that says "Show Found In Mail Calendar". What is "Found"?

If theres a "?" in that pref.window, click it to hopefully open a Help page with an place that should explain all the options you have in that window.

Sorry, I can't help with any solutions for your Calendar problems.







- Patrick
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[Slydude]

Hello All!

And, still another question if I may be greedy, in Preferences there is a box to mark that says "Show Found In Mail Calendar". What is "Found"?

Thank You All Very Much for your thoughts & ideas! They are appreciated.

Paul

I believe that option refers to the way that the Calendar app handles dates mentioned in an email. If you are using the Mail app and receive an email with a date and time in it, a new calendar event can be created based on that entry. I'm pretty sure these entries are entered in a caldendar called Found in Mail.

 

[PGB1]

Thanks Patrick & Slydyde for helping out.
There wasn't a "?" to click to explain "Found", so I explored Sludude's suggestion.

I sent myself a test mail with a future date and time in it. Hovering over the date in the body of the message gave me an arrow to click to let me send it to Calendar app. Pretty Spiffy. It shows up as "New Event", but can be edited. Supposedly the found events go on a separate calendar titled "Found In Mail", but on my computer, they are in the regular and Found In Mail calendars and the Found In Mail calendar has all the events for the other calendar. So what the purpose of the separate "found" calendar is eludes me. I'll probably never use this feature, but it is fun to experiment...

As far as the problem with notifications and e-mails, I think I will resort to deleting the preference file to see if that clears up the confusion. (After doing a brand new backup and writing down all of the events, as I'd imagine they will get wiped out with the preference file.)

If that fails to fix things up, it may be time to Nuke-And-Fix the computer. Mail is not acting properly- crashing often and not trying to connect to the server, System Preferences Log Out does not work any longer, Safari crashes often & a few more glitches. I hate the mass destruction method, so I'll work on each of the above problems one at a time. They're just annoyances at this point, so no crisis.

Thanks Again Patrick & Slydude for taking the time to reply and suggest. I hope you both can Enjoy Today!
Paul

 

[pm-r]

If that fails to fix things up, it may be time to Nuke-And-Fix the computer.

You might want to try just running Disk Utility "First Aid" option when booted from the "Recovery HD" and/or download the compatible Mac OS X COMBO Update from Apple's support site and run and install it.

Those two procedures can often fix some goofy Mac problems.





- Patrick
======

 

[PGB1]

Thanks Patrick for your advice.
First Aid didn't solve the Calendar problem, but it did manage to make the timed Log Out work again. I have the Combo Update, too.

For Calendar, I decided to start over. I'll write what I did here so if someone else has the problem, the words may save them some searching around.

The preference type files & folders were hard to find at first because I searched for "Calendar", the name of the application. But, some of them use the old "iCal" instead.

A) Copied all of the events that were currently in Calendar to a Text Edit document.
I did this manually, but there is probably an automatic method that's way easier, but the technology section of my brain can only hold so much stuff at once...

B) Made sure my computer backups were up-to-date & current.

C) Moved these files off the computer, but saved them just in case. re-booting after each step:

1)HDD/Users/User Name/Library/Preferences/com.apple.ical.plist
Note- The problems remained and the events remained in Calendar.

2) HDD/Users/User Name/Library/Calendars (moved the entire folder)
Note- The events were now gone, but the problems remained.

3)HDD/Users/User Name/Library/Preferences/iCalExternalSync plist
There are many more files with iCalExternalSync in the name scattered about. (Easy Find found them, Spotlight did not.) I left those alone.

There are many more iCal related files in the computer. Since the above three seem to have solved the problem, I didn't mess with the others.

RESULTS-
After the above steps, the Calendar application has not given me a false alarm notification. That was about 30 hours ago, so time will tell.
It also seems to have solved the problem where an event won't e-mail a notification.
The default event start time is still stuck at 9:00am. It's no big deal but it should be working since Preferences lets you pick a time. the entire world does not start their day at 9 o'clock.


A POTENTIAL PROBLEM-
I all of my testing, I did notice one (to me) unforgivable shortcoming of Calendar:

If an event is scheduled to start when the computer is off, no notification- not even an e-mail- will ever be sent.
For Example- If an event Start Time is set to 4:00am, but the computer is not turned on until 5:00, the event won't give a notification & the e-mail won't be sent. Ever.

Why Do i Care? Because I cheat. If I have to be somewhere at a certain time that is earlier than my normal schedule, I'll enter an event with an early-enough start time to notify me. When I start the Mac at the normal time, say 5:00, the event notification should (by my reasoning) be there when I log in and there should be an e-mail.

My Andorid phone's calendar does the same thing. If the phone is off, the event notification is skipped.

Work Around- I suppose it's time to learn a new habit. I could open the application right away every day & manually look.
Or, do like my wife does- Pencil & paper on a legal pad. Her method doesn't care if you look at 4 am or 10 am- The notification is still there. Amazing technology!

Dad's Plan-
When he was getting older & struggling with memory, my father used to use those little, square sticky note papers for appointments & put them on the kitchen cabinets. After a while, there would be hundreds of them completely covering the cabinet doors. They would sometimes be 10 notes deep, as he'd remember to put the note, just not read & remove it.
He was a great guy and a quite a brilliant man. I felt sad because his memory problems were so frustrating for him. Now, I'm headed down that path. Personally, I plan to enjoy the ride.

Thanks Again for helping Patrick & Slydude. I appreciate your guidance. Thanks, too, for reminding me of First Aid. It is often helpful, as is Onyx.
Hopefully I can soon figure out the other glitches in the computer.

I Hope You Both Enjoy This Day!
Paul

 

[pm-r]

Hopefully I can soon figure out the other glitches in the computer.

Good luck with all the other glitches.

As for your calendar and appointments, maybe you should consider getting a small pocket electronic calendar with appointment and alarm features and use it instead.

Actually you posted so much above about what you did, but I'm not really understanding what it is you want to do.
But one thing is sure, if you're going to use and rely on your Mac or cell phone, you're sure going to have to learn and change your habits and make sure to leave them turned on.

There's no way in **** that any alarm is going to work if they are asleep or turned off.





- Patrick
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[PGB1]

Hello Patrick,
Thanks for replying.
What I primarily wanted to do was get the Calendar application to send notifications at the proper time (not over & over randomly) and to send the e-mail notifications I asked it to send. Having the notification default at my chosen time was an extra. I really should not have cluttered the post with the other OS X problems. Sorry for confusing stuff.

As far as having a notification that is set for a time when the computer is off, I explained very poorly. Of course a device can't send an alarm when it is off unless it is built specially for the purpose.

Here's how I should have explained it-
I did not want the computer to wake up and notify. What I expected the computer would do was check for Calendar event notification after booting up and post that notification- even if its time has past. Failing that, at least send the e-mail notification for the past event.

I guess I don't mind leaving the computer on always, but there is no way the cell phone is staying on. I guess I'm not a fan of being 'connected' all the time. I don't even have a FaceBrickWall account- geezer that I am.

So, it's off to the office store to buy a case of sticky notes!

 

[MacInWin]

Why not use Reminders to do that? Set a reminder for a time and date and when it gets to that time, you get a notification. If the device is off at that time, when it comes on, you get the alert (at least that's how it works for me). The nice thing is that you can sync reminders between the Mac and an iPhone, but you have something Android, if I read you correctly. I've never had an Android, but does it have the equivalent of iOS's "Do Not Disturb?" With that set for a time, the iPhone won't wake you for anything but emergencies (people you allow it to ring for, weather or disaster alerts, etc) either between two times or until you turn it off. If Android supports something similar then your statement, "there is no way the cell phone is staying on" can be retired and you can leave the phone on. Then give your reminder program on the phone authority to override the Do Not Disturb and it will alert you at the right time.

 

[PGB1]

Thank You Jake for the idea of using the Reminders application.

To be honest, I saw it in the applications folder once, checked it out briefly and decided Calendar application would work fine. Oops. I've been experimenting with Reminders since I saw your post. It's is filling the gap really well. It's also been quite reliable about notifying.

There is some kind of way to sync Reminders with the Andorid phone (or perhaps many ways). I just read a little about it so far. I think with some you use iCloud in the middle. I'll dig deeper into it. It sounds helpful.

Android does have a Do Not Disturb & I can set exceptions, so that's pretty handy. Thanks for that idea.

Thanks Again All for helping me out with Calendar. I'm still learning and rather enjoying it.

Paul

 

[pm-r]

Thank You Jake for the idea of using the Reminders application.

+1, and isn't it amazing how one can forget that an application is right under one's nose when it isn't used very often.

I have just used the Calendar.app because some utilities made it so easy to use with their menu access option. (I started with Fantastical but it got too fancy and using some annoying access and way too expensive, so I switched to using Calendar 366 Plus and popCalendar)

I'll have to look and see if Reminders also has a compactible utility for quick menu drop down access. Or just carry on using Calendar.app as there doesn't seem to be too much difference between the two.


EDIT:
Something I'll read a bit later that might be useful:
Apple’s Mac Reminders App Is More Capable Than You May Realize
Mar 6, 2018
https://www.capitolmac.com/apples-mac-reminders-app-is-more-capable-than-you-may-realize/






- Patrick
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[PGB1]

thanks Again All!
I'm enjoying using Reminders. It's simple enough that I can't mess up. Well...
Thanks for the link Patrick. That is an interesting article.

Enjoy Today,
Paul

 

[IWT]

Nice find, Patrick. I have never used Reminders, I suppose because in the twilight of my life, I have relatively little to remember and when I do, it's a bonus.

Of course, I make little notes of things I must, or at least, should do today.

Anyway, following your article, I've been experimenting with Reminders and, yes maybe, it will do the trick.

I guess the message is, try something new and, if you don't like it, well you made the effort. But if it helps, be thankful to the person who pointed it out to you.

So thanks.

Ian

 

[MacInWin]

I've been a Reminders user for a long time now. Instead of dictating a note, I have Siri remind me. If I say to Siri, "Remind me at 10:30 Dentist appointment" then at 10:30 I get an alert from Reminders about my appointment. Ditto for shopping lists. What I have not been able to do is have Siri set a reminder for when I arrive somewhere. She complains that Reminders needs to have access to my location services (it has that) before Siri can set that reminder. Both Siri and Reminder have such access, but I've not been able to figure out why it doesn't work. Then I could say "Remind me when I get to xxx to do yyyy." I can do that in Reminders manually, and theoretically Siri should do it, but for some reason it doesn't work. More research required.

 

[pm-r]

I found there are quite a few recommended Mac OS "Reminder" replacement applications out there, but this cute little menu item only "Speedy Reminder.app" uses the existing Mac Reminder.app, but it's $5-$6 via the app store only it looks like:
https://www.pointworks.de/software/speedy-reminder/

But it gives nice quick access from the menubar icon and saves opening the Reminder application.





- Patrick
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[MacInWin]

Patrick, nice find, but why pay for an app that does basically what you can do for free? Put Reminder in the Dock and one click opens it. Exactly the same work to get exactly the same result.

 

[pm-r]

Patrick, nice find, but why pay for an app that does basically what you can do for free?

Quite true Jake, and I guess that's why I mentioned and included it's price, but at least it gives the user an option if they want to use it.

But just running Reminders.app on it's own isn't that much different and is quite compact with easy access on it's own.

It's a bit odd that, as you found out, it doesn't work a bit better when using Siri.

I wonder if Automator with some voice command could do better?





- Patrick
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[MacInWin]

Maybe, it's not really that critical to me. If Siri will just get the reminder into the system, I can edit later if location is critical. I have security set pretty tightly on my iPhone, so it's probably something I've set a little too tight. I'll get to it someday, maybe.

 

[pm-r]

I'll get to it someday, maybe.

Ahhh yes… the old 'round TUIT shows itself once again…





- Patrick
======

 

[pm-r]

I'll get to it someday, maybe.

Ahhh yes… the old 'round TUIT shows itself once again…







- Patrick
======