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Smart calendar app Tempo speeds up your day
Not to bother you with a study from the University of the Obvious, but if you think about the history of technologically facilitated intelligent agents, the goal always seems to be to sub in for a clever, always-on human personal assistant. There's a reason that hyper-busy, well-compensated folk have such staffers on the payroll: they make things easier. Need a file for that meeting, or background on the attendees? Running late and need to tell them? Want to know which flights are delayed before you head to the airport, or where to park near the place you're having lunch? With a personal assistant, one call or text and you've got it handled. We can't all have personal aides, but a lot of us have smartphones. Siri tackles the question of accessing your data or contacting people without putting your hands and / or eyes on the iPhone; Android's Google Now feature aims at the information supply side, parceling out the tidbits you need (or at least the ones it thinks you need) just when you're likely to want them. Even the oversubscribed launch of Mailbox this week speaks to the desire we have to start getting a streamlined, secure handle on the ebb and flow of our critical information. Another option for getting the smart back into your smartphone launches today, and it's aimed at both your calendar and all the collateral information that surrounds it. Tempo Smart Calendar, incubated in Siri's birthplace at SRI International, derives situational awareness by analyzing your meetings alongside other data sinks like your email, LinkedIn contacts, attachments, location and more. The app is iPhone-only for now, with other platforms to come along later. Tempo may look like other calendar apps on the App Store -- to my eyes, it pays some UI tribute to the revamped Gmail native app -- but its power lies in context as well as content. Rather than overwhelm you with every tidbit and factoid about your events, Tempo's design is intended to "reduce the noise that's often associated with virtual assistants that push information to users out of context or intent," says founder and CEO Raj Singh. The app will even find context that you didn't explicitly associate with the event, by looking for frequently emailed people connected to meeting hosts or attachments to messages with contextually relevant subjects. Wherever possible, the calendar app distills actions down to a single tap: send an "I'm running late" alert, get directions, pull up attachments for the next appointment, check LinkedIn profiles or join a conference call (it even auto-dials conference codes for you, which I currently do with a $1.99 singletasker). As Tempo learns your modus operandi, it adjusts to provide the most-frequently needed information more promptly. I may not be busy enough to take full advantage of Tempo's savvy, but if your day involves hopping from call to meeting to meal to evening, you may indeed benefit from the added clarity and context that the app provides. Of course, Tempo's AI has to learn about you and what your day looks like, so using it means giving it access to a lot of your personal data, including your email (and letting it mull for a while on initial setup). If that makes you uncomfortable, be forewarned. You should check the Tempo site for privacy assurances and make sure that if you do try it and don't like it, you can fully erase yourself from the service. Tempo's privacy statement is here; the important note for anyone who intends to do a short-term trial and possibly cancel later on is that if you delete your Tempo account, your third-party service info might remain on their system for several weeks until it's aged out. If you want to get your mail and other data off more quickly, be sure to remove those subaccounts within the Tempo app before deleting your master Tempo account. Tempo is launching as a free app, with possible premium features down the road for paid users. In contrast to Mailbox's Gmail-only limitation, Tempo is calendar- and email-agnostic. To provide a sense of what's possible inside the app, Tempo's produced this adorable promo video featuring a busy architect dad and his preternaturally articulate daughter. Robert Scoble also has a 30-minute interview with founder Singh in his enthusiastic writeup.
Mac 101: Schedule event details in the event title with Calendar
More Mac 101, tips and tricks for novice Mac users. Let's say you've just got off the phone with a friend. You've arranged to meet later for coffee, but you don't want to forget, so you go to Calendar on your Mac to schedule the event. You double click the date you're going to meet, enter a title, like "Meet Martin for Coffee" and hit return. The event has been created, but all the details still need to be populated. So you double click the event again, to open it and enter further details, like time, location, etc. Or do you? With the Calendar app in Mac OS X, you can schedule event details in the event title. The Calendar app will intuitively read those details and populate the appropriate sections. For example, let's say you're meeting Bob Jones for breakfast tomorrow at 8 AM at 23 Commercial Street. Simply enter "Breakfast with Bob 8 AM 23 Commercial Street" in the event title and Calendar will populate the time and location for you. Unfortunately, you can't schedule alert or note details like this, but this neat trick is really helpful for quick and snappy Calendar entries. This tip works for most computerized calendars out there (including web-based ones like Google's Calendar), but I'm always surprised at just how many people don't know they can do it.
Quickly sketch out class or meeting schedules with Weekly Schedule for iPad
With so many ways to share calendars and schedules, sometimes it's nice to go a little bit old-school with a blank sheet of paper, a Magic Marker and a little bit of time. Mobile Simplified's $0.99 Weekly Schedule app, just released to the US App Store for iPad, delivers some of that hands-on feeling as it lets you create sharable weekly agendas, monthly calendars and task lists. Weekly Schedule inherits most of its features from the $1.99 iTeach Pad, which also includes student management and lesson plan options; both apps share a UI aesthetic with a more "classroom" feel than most iOS offerings. The core schedule features are simple: on a time grid for the week, you add your event blocks and build out your schedule. If you want a specific event to repeat all week long (a morning meeting, for instance) just tap and hold to duplicate it. Blocks get a specific duration, color and name when you create them, and they hold onto that indefinitely. (You can also edit the names of the days, and it's easy to accidentally edit Friday when trying to tap the "add event" button.) The quick drag-and-drop rearrangement of the blocks -- almost as if you had paper cutouts on a cardboard schedule -- makes it easy to fit all the necessary schedule elements into your week, and know that you're not skipping anything. In the monthly calendar mode, you're actually getting an alternate view of your iPad calendar data one month at a time. It's not as flexible as dedicated apps like Agenda or Readdle's Calendars, but it's a nice overview. The Lists view gives you a basic task manager, with folders to group lists of individual to-dos. Each task can be checked off with a single tap. Sharing and exporting is an interesting -- and very constrained -- feature in Weekly Schedule. Nothing is cloud synced, dynamic or remotely editable (except events in the Calendar view, if your native calendars are shared); it's all local data, all on your iPad. For the weekly view and the calendar view, there's one way to get your work out to your colleagues -- you email an image of the schedule or calendar. Yep, that's it. For task lists, the email is text instead of an image, which is appropriate for that data type. I'd love to see some next-gen features (AirPrint, flexible export options) make it into Weekly Schedule down the road. In the meantime, though, if you have a weekly planner to make and only your iPad handy, it's a solid tool.
AppleScripting Notification Center > Scheduling Do Not Disturb
Mountain Lion's Notification Center is great for keeping you in the loop, but it can be a huge distraction when you need to get stuff done. Sometimes, a little peace and quiet is all you need to stay productive. As you may know, iOS 6 includes a handy Do Not Disturb feature, which can be turned on to disable notifications. It can even be set to automatically enable/disable itself at scheduled intervals. Mountain Lion also lets you disable Notification Center. Just open Notification Center and drag down to access a Show Alerts and Banners toggle switch. Note that this is a temporary setting, and disabled notifications automatically re-enable at midnight. Unlike iOS 6, though, Mountain Lion doesn't give you an option for enabling/disabling notifications on a schedule. At least, it doesn't provide a built-in option for this. With a little customized help from AppleScript, Automator, and the Calendar app, it is possible. In this post, you'll create two Calendar Alarm Automator workflows, which can be configured to run at scheduled times to enable or disable Notification Center alerts and banners. Note: If you have any trouble following along, you can download the completed AppleScripts and Automator workflows here. Building a Workflow to Enable Do Not Disturb (i.e. Disable Notification Center Alerts and Banners) 1. Launch Automator (in your /Applications folder) and create a new Calendar Alarm workflow. 2. Search the action library for the Run AppleScript action and drag it to the workflow area. 3. Replace the pre-filled AppleScript code in the Run AppleScript action with the following: The script writes to Notification Center's property list file and enables Do Not Disturb mode. It then quits and relaunches Notification Center in order for the change to go into effect. 4. You're finished building the workflow, so go ahead and save it as Enable Do Not Disturb. 5. When you save the workflow, Automator puts it where it needs to go (the ~/Library/Workflows/Applications/Calendar folder). The Calendar app launches and a new event is created in an Automator calendar, which Automator creates if it doesn't already exist. The event should be configured with an Open File alarm that's set to run the workflow. Schedule the event for the desired time, such as every weekday morning at 6 AM. Now, every time the event occurs, the alarm should launch the workflow and Notification Center should be disabled. As I mentioned earlier, Notification Center automatically re-enables each day at midnight. So, if you plan to schedule Do Not Disturb overnight, then you'll need to create an additional event that disables it again at 12:01 AM. Building a Workflow to Disable Do Not Disturb (i.e. Re-Enable Notification Center Alerts and Banners) Now that you've got a workflow to disable Notification Center, you probably want one to re-enable it. 1. Create another new Calendar Alarm workflow in Automator. 2. Search the action library for the Run AppleScript action again and drag it to the workflow area. 3. This time, replace the existing placeholder script in the Run AppleScript action with the following code: This code updates Notification Center's property list file to disable Do Not Disturb. Then, it relaunches Notification Center for the change to take effect. 4. The workflow is done, so save it as Disable Do Not Disturb. 5. The Calendar app should launch again and another event should be added to the Automator calendar. This event should be configured with an Open File alarm that's set to open the Disable Do Not Disturb workflow. Set it to run on the desired schedule, such as every weekday morning at 9 AM. If everything has gone according to plan, you should now have Do Not Disturb workflows that disable and re-enable Notification Center alerts and banners at the desired times. Use your alert-free time wisely. Until next time, happy scripting!
TUAW Best of 2012 Personal Picks: Michael Rose
At the start of 2012, Apple customers and employees were emerging from the initial mourning period for founder and chairman Steve Jobs. Twelve months later, with the first full post-Jobs year in the books, Apple is (mostly) on track with some remarkable successes and only one or two noticeable calamities. Here's my highly idiosyncratic list of pleasant surprises from the year that was. You can browse my colleagues' lists here. Best Free Upgrade: Hulu Plus on Apple TV. There's nothing better than getting new tricks out of an old dog, and with July's unexpected addition of Hulu Plus to the Apple TV, I found new delight in my little black hockey puck. The other subscription, purchase and streaming services on the Apple TV are all worthwhile, but I was already a Hulu Plus subscriber. I'd jumped through several hoops to get VGA and audio from my MacBook into my TV for those instances when I wanted to screen a Hulu show in larger format; it was enough of a pain to discourage me from getting the most out of my subscription. Hulu's ad-supplemented service might not be a perfect all-you-can-eat TV option, but it certainly makes cord-cutting a more appealing possibility. Having it on the Apple TV gives Apple's "hobby" more credibility as a true living room reformer. Whether or not the hypothetical "Apple television" debuts in 2013, the current offering (including the March hardware upgrade to 1080p) has some legs. Honorable mention: We had to wander through the wilderness for a few months -- quite literally, in some cases -- before finding our way to a better navigation and mapping solution on iPhone. Not everyone rejected Apple's new Maps app. But for those who had issues, the problems were real and really annoying. Never mind the 3D views, Siri integration and free, fast turn-by-turn directions that we'd been waiting years to get; if point A to point B ends you at point nowhere, that's no good. Thanks to the introduction of Google's new app in December, we have something close to the best of both worlds. An improving, imperfect on-board solution that's still offering next-gen functionality as the underlying POI database catches up; plus another free, sleek and easy Google-powered app that's delivering more (TBT navigation! Voice!) than the old app ever did. Best Hardware Milestone: MacBook Pro with Retina display. Six months in, and some days I'm still not sure I made the right choice in going for the Retina 15" MBP over a fully souped-up MacBook Air. But then I spend a week away from my desktop, absorbed in the so-sharp-it-might-cut-you screen of the MBP and the remarkable performance of the all-solid-state architecture, and the extra weight in my backpack doesn't bother me so much. Apple's great leap forward in portable displays comes with a steep sticker price, and there are still a few rough edges with naïve screenshot tools and key un-Retinized apps that show up as blocky as refugees from MacPaint Mountain. (I'm looking at you, ScreenSteps 2.) But Apple's willingness to push the envelope on HiDPI display technology -- and customers' comfort level with buying in -- once again puts the company's portable computing offerings at the top of the heap. Honorable mention: No word yet from Thor's lawyers, but the mobile-to-Mac revamp of Apple's peripheral connectivity with Thunderbolt and Lightning has caused less pain than I expected and delivered more benefits than I hoped. The pace of Thunderbolt peripheral releases has sped up from a stall to a modest trot, and Mac support for the fast USB 3 standard has also helped ease the aggravation of dealing with dongles and adapters for legacy FireWire gear. On the iOS side, the Lightning connector delivers more mechanical reliability while maintaining solid compatibility with docks, clocks and chargers via the 30-pin adapter lineup. Of course, the Lightning adapter wouldn't have anything to connect to without the handsome iPhone 5, fourth-gen iPad and iPad mini. Worst Surprise: For anyone who was hoping to cash in on resale of an iPad 3rd generation, it's got to be the "early" introduction of the Lightning-equipped fourth gen iPad. You live and you learn. Best OS Overhauls: iOS 6 and Mountain Lion. Neither of Apple's big OS releases this year escaped criticism and controversy. iOS 6 faced the aforementioned Maps migraines, and Mountain Lion's Gatekeeper app security and Facebook integration. But the benefits of the new systems outweigh the drawbacks. Mountain Lion's on-board Dictation support, Notification Center and baked-in AirPlay mirroring helped make 2012 easier than 2011. iOS 6's panorama photos, improved Siri, Passbook, expanded Open In menu, the indispensable Guided Access and even Maps brought the mobile platform forward. Honorable mention: This was the year the Mac App Store came into its own as a valid, vibrant channel for Mac software. Many of my favorite Mac apps have found a home on the MAS; several more, unfortunately, have backed off the store as the sandboxing restrictions proved too challenging or detrimental to core functionality. Here's hoping that the 2013 MAS delivers some of the flexibility these apps need to thrive. Favorite Mac Apps: It took too long (really, way too long) for Cultured Code's Things to deliver cloud synchronization of tasks -- but now that it's here as part of Things 2, it's made my daily routine a lot easier. All my iOS devices and my Mac have the same to-do list instantaneously, with no fuss. (Yes, I could get some of the same mileage out of iCloud and Reminders, but I need more categorization and tagging options in my crazy register of things that are overdue.) Likewise, the newly streamlined BusyCal 2 delivers a solid and reliable calendar for anyone who needs more than Apple's Calendar or Microsoft's Outlook can supply. Honorable mention: The dead simple screenshare/remote meeting tool join.me, from the fine folks at LogMeIn, works great on the Mac and surprisingly well on the iPad. It's so much easier than most meeting tools, it's almost unfair. Bonus points for the feature that lets you hand off control and sharing to one of your attendees, then reclaim the mouse for your own; as a last-ditch, low-fi remote support tool (when Messages screensharing and Back to my Mac falls down) it's a delight. Favorite iOS Apps: I never imagined that a third-party "killer app" would revitalize an iOS baked-in feature, but I stand corrected. Loren Brichter's Letterpress is that app, and it's singlehandedly made Game Center cool again. I was also excited to see the official Khan Academy iPad app make its debut, for all your math video needs. Readdle's Calendars app is a must-have for anyone wrangling multiple Google calendars and reasonably priced at $6.99; I've dinged Readdle in the past for some questionable UI choices in its apps, but Calendars is clean and clever. Finally, for maintaining my inner serenity (to say nothing of my multiple time-zone sleep patterns), I depend on the library of Andrew Johnson relaxation apps. You can get a taste of Johnson's gravelly Scottish tones in the free Relaxing Holidays app, or browse his entire hypnotherapy catalog on the App Store and in the audiobooks section. (Bonus points for one of the best app names of all time, if you imagine it being shouted by an angry spouse as you head out to the pub.) Favorite Accessories: Speaking of behavior modification, the Fitbit activity tracker has given me insight into my sleep and fitness level in 2012 (spoiler alert: it's not so good), and the motivation to step it up in 2013. Fitbit's Ultra pedometer, my model, has been discontinued in favor of the One tracker; the new unit adds direct wireless sync to Bluetooth 4.0 iOS devices. Since I do quite a bit of flying, the automatic noise cancellation in the Fanny Wang 3000 Series headphones makes a big difference in podcast and music listening onboard. The FW 'phones are somewhat oversize for everyday use, but in noisy environments they're exactly what the ear doctor ordered. Also in the road warrior category, I spent a lot of 2012 looking for the perfect iPad keyboard/case combo. I may not have found the ideal fit, but until I do the Adonit writer keyboard and case has made my iPad a more effective writing tool. The keyboard is leagues better than the cheap Bluetooth options from some other vendors (ahem, Boxwave) and the easy-clip frame lets me quickly transition from convertible to standalone iPad use. Best Raging Against The Dying Of The Light: Macworld | iWorld. When Apple made its last official appearance at Macworld Expo in early 2009, the conventional wisdom was that the tradeshow and conference would not survive much longer without the imprimatur of the mother company. So much for the conventional wisdom, I suppose. While smaller and scrappier, the show continues to draw an audience of eager Mac and iOS fans, developers and creative pros. For last year's event, Paul Kent and his team at IDG rebranded the show as Macworld | iWorld, acknowledging the shifting platform emphasis toward mobile while making the show's name much harder to print correctly. The upcoming fourth post-Apple edition will be kicking off on January 31 and running through February 2. TUAW will be there, and after a one-year hiatus, so will I -- and I'm looking forward to seeing many of you there, too.
Officers' Quarters: 10 tips for successful guild events
Every Monday, Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership. He is the author of The Guild Leader's Handbook. Guild events outside of the usual raiding and PvP activities can help break up the monotony and get people excited about their guild. This week's email comes from an "event officer" who wants to know, how do you get people to show up? I am an officer in my guild, and we have been re-evaluating our roles. I am considering becoming the Social Event Coordinator, and I am looking for some advice to get things started. ... My ideas include scheduling nights to do scenarios/dungeons for achievements, old school raids, and probably a pet battle league once people aren't as focused on gearing up for raids. My questions are: Do you have any suggestions on how to communicate to guildies that aren't around much that these events are being planned? Do you have suggestions on how to determine interest before scheduling? Do you have suggestions on how to encourage participation? Do you have other event ideas that have worked for you?
Build a photo calendar with Automator
You've seen it in your Launchpad. You've seen it in your Applications folder. It's Automator. It sounds cool. It looks cool. It's got a cool robot icon. But, what can it really do, and why should you care about it? Well, Automator can do lots of things to improve and streamline your OS X experience. With Automator, you use building blocks called actions like ingredients in a recipe. When your actions are strung together, the result is an Automator workflow that can perform a series of tasks. Apple provides lots of built-in actions for automating things with Calendar, Mail, Safari, and more. You get even more actions as you install Automator-ready apps, like Aperture, BBEdit, Microsoft Office, and Transmit. What you can do with Automator depends on the actions installed on your Mac. So, you may run into limitations if you don't have actions for certain tasks, or if an app doesn't support Automator. For simple things like working with folders, images, and PDFs, however, it's a great tool that can save you time and let you do some fun stuff. In this post, I'll show you how to use Automator to create a print plugin that shows up in the PDF menu when you print a document. This specific plugin lets you print a photo calendar right out of the Calendar app.
BusyCal 2 adds new views, menu bar quick entry, gives up Sync Services
It was already among the leading Calendar/iCal replacement apps for productivity aficionados, and now BusyCal has received a boost of new functionality with the release of BusyCal 2. The update includes improved iCloud functionality, and is also compatible with Google Calendar and other services based on the CalDAV standard. It requires OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion; users of Leopard and Snow Leopard can still use BusyCal 1.6 to sync over the local network with 2.0 users. BusyCal 2 adds natural language support for event entry, a live 10-day weather forecast and even a new heat map view that gives you a glimpse at how busy the next 12 months will be. The updated app also works hand in hand with new Mountain Lion features like Notification Center for updates and alerts. A new menu bar applet (similar to Fantastical and Today) lets you browse the day's events without opening the full BusyCal application, and you can also use it to create new events and to-do reminders. In addition to the cloud service calendar access it offers, BusyCal retains its popular ability to sync calendars between instances of the app running on different Macs on the same LAN... with a caveat or two. Users of BusyCal 1.6 should note that there are several functional changes from 1.6 to 2.0. As Apple's Sync Services framework is deprecated in Mountain Lion, features in BusyCal that leveraged it (crossover synchronization with iCal/Calendar, Outlook or Entourage; direct calendar sync via iTunes to iOS devices) are no longer available. Since BusyCal 2.0 doesn't sync with calendar apps that support Exchange, the BC 1.x "hack" that allowed Outlook users to replicate their work calendars onto Google Calendar isn't possible in the new version. In fact, BusyCal 2 doesn't publish calendars to Google at all; they need to be created on the web side, then you can subscribe to them in the app. Another consequence of the rebuild is that LAN-shared calendars (not iCloud or Google hosted calendars) cannot be synced to iTunes devices or published to the cloud services; they are local network only. BusyCal 2 carries over the same clean, accessible aesthetic of its predecessor, letting you view the upcoming days, weeks, months or even years without being overwhelmed. The app is available for US$29.99 via the App Store, but you can take it for a free 30-day test drive via the official website.
Google Calendar for Android becomes stand-alone app
Google has historically broken out preloaded Android apps like Gmail and Maps as stand-alone titles so that they don't have to be upgraded in lock-step with the main OS, but its Calendar app typically hasn't had that privilege. The isolation ends with a newly distinct Google Calendar that's treated as just another Google Play download. You'll need at least Android 4.0 or 4.1, which leaves relatively few differences between the download and what's already on your device, but that's not the point -- the change really lets Google move users on to the Jelly Bean app and beyond, even if their device makers aren't ready. Owners currently running Jelly Bean will still get a few extras, such as better support for non-Nexus hardware and a wider time range for calendar syncing. Hit the source link if you're game for that kind of futureproofing.
Google tests searches that include Calendar, Drive in results
Google has been testing an expanded search that includes Gmail results ever since August, and it's been enough of a hit that the company is swinging for the fences with an expanded test. The new version lets Gmail members find Calendar appointments and Drive files through the autocomplete results in the search box. Visit the main Google page and the results won't be quite as broad, but they'll include both the previous trial's Gmail information as well as Drive -- thankfully, tucked to the side rather than dominating the main page. Any individual, English-literate Google fans can join the new trial to get early access and find that long lost spreadsheet in the cloud.
iOS's Notification Center cares more about my contacts' birthdays than I do
I love Notification Center, but there's one thing that's bugged me about it since its introduction in iOS 5 and that thing is even worse in iOS 6: Notification Center always shows your contacts' birthdays no matter what. In iOS 5 this wasn't too annoying, because most people probably didn't have a birthday listed for every contact in their address book (just the important ones -- like close friends and family). However, with the introduction of Facebook integration in iOS 6 (if you've enabled it), if a Facebook friend has their birthday listed, it's now in their contact card in iOS 6 Contacts. And if it's in their contact card, it will always show up in your Notification Center. Now, I'm assuming this is just a bug that Apple has yet to kill (then again, it's been around since iOS 5, so maybe it's a "feature") but Apple needs to kill it quick. Why? Because, like other "features" of Facebook integration in iOS 6, this one too gives you plenty of information you don't need and displays it front and center in your Notification Center. Take for example the screenshot above. On that day, Notification Center showed me that three of my contacts had birthdays. Because a birthday is an all-day event, they are shown before other timed events in my Calendar. This is just more clutter that pushes relevant information (like meetings) off screen. Now keep in mind that I'm the kind of guy who only connects with people on Facebook who I know in real life. I've got fewer than 200 Facebook friends. That's still 200 extra all-day events that are going to show up in Notification Center that I don't want to see. Given that many people (especially younger users) have 500 to 1,000 Facebook friends, they could potentially be seeing two to three birthdays every day -- again, this would obscure more relevant information. To be clear, this isn't just a Facebook birthdays problem. Notification Center had this problem before Facebook integration. The Facebook integration just makes it that much worse. But simply disabling Facebook integration will not stop all birthdays from showing up in Notification Center. As noted by one of our commenters, you can hide birthday calendars from the Calendars app in iOS by selecting the "Calendars" button and then deselecting the Facebook birthday calendar and the "Other" birthday calendar, but this doesn't actually stop those birthdays from showing up in Notification Center (though it should). That's why I'm assuming this is still a bug that needs to be squashed. But let's squash it already. It's been a year.
Exchange/iOS "meeting hijack" history goes back well before iOS 6
Yesterday, in discussing the new reports of meeting invitation issues between Microsoft Exchange and iOS 6 devices using ActiveSync, I mentioned that I recall having seen these sorts of problems in prior versions of iOS and OS X, albeit infrequently. The issue manifests as one recipient declining an invitation which mistakenly cancels the meeting for everyone, "hijacking" the meeting out from under the original organizer. My recollection was probably accurate, given the report below from a TUAW reader who prefers not to identify his former employer. The full rundown is worth reading, but here's the summary: iOS's implementation of ActiveSync, in iOS 6 and well before, may be doing some things (asserting ownership of meetings that in fact do not "belong" to the Exchange account on the iPhone) that theoretically should not be allowed under the protocol specification. Exchange, in turn, is not enforcing the spec and refusing these inappropriate requests as it ought; it's taking them at face value. The end result: meetings get dropped but neither vendor is apparently willing to take point on the issue. Our reader's story: The problem with iOS and Exchange is something that we discovered at my previous place of employment. It's a nasty bug and I'm sad to see that it persists. Before I sat down to write you, [I checked with] those folks to see if iOS 6.0 had made it better at all. They reported it was worse. With that in mind... We had a term for the problem. It was "meeting hijacking." It describes a scenario in which an iOS device could "hijack" a Microsoft Exchange meeting. The hijacking would make an attendee the organizer of the meeting and if they declined or deleted the meeting, Exchange would then send a decline to [all the other invitees] and cause fairly major issues. We first witnessed this problem around iOS 4.3, if I remember correctly. We were running Exchange 2007 for tens of thousands of users. We had the latest service packs and cumulative updates installed. (The problem also occurred in iOS 5.0 and higher, and apparently it's not fixed in iOS 6.0 either. It has also been verified against Exchange 2010, but more on that in a minute). To reproduce the issue, here's what we did: Using Outlook for Windows, create a meeting and add attendees. Make one of the attendees an email list that is EXTERNAL to the Exchange organization. That means it cannot be a distribution group in Active Directory. It needs to be a Mailman or majordomo list that is outside the Exchange org. The members of the external email list receive the invitation and accept it. The acceptance is written back to Exchange and put on the calendar. The iOS device owned by a member of the email list picks up the meeting and places it on the calendar. All is happy. At some point, the iOS device syncs the calendar via ActiveSync and suddenly becomes confused about who the owner of the meeting should be (the organizer, in Exchange-speak). The iPhone decides that its owner should become the organizer, since it has no idea who the real owner is, and syncs this property change back to the Exchange server. Exchange 2007 now has a disconnected copy of the meeting with a different owner. Exchange is agnostic about this. Now the iPhone owner declines the meeting for whatever reason. Exchange automatically generates a cancellation or decline notice and sends it out to everyone since the disconnected copy of the meeting has a different owner. This results in mass confusion and sometimes will delete the meeting from the other calendars. We verified this problem against iOS 4, 5 and 6 with Exchange 2007 and 2010. In Exchange 2010, Microsoft introduced a "calendar repair agent" that is supposed to detect this problem and resolve it. This calendar repair agent is a daily timer job. Microsoft did release patches on Exchange 2007 SP2 and up to correct some of the issues that are similar to this, but this particular problem was never resolved. Now for the dirty laundry. We worked for about two years with Microsoft and Apple on this issue. It may have been longer, I don't recall. We had a major support contract with Microsoft and reported this issue to them. I'll spare you the gory details. But the end result was this: The root cause is that iOS is able to convince ActiveSync to manipulate properties on meetings that it should not be able to manipulate (namely, the organizer of the meeting). Sometimes, it will make these decisions because for whatever reason it believes [these changes are] in the best interest of the user. Microsoft has an ActiveSync specification that calls out what properties should and should not be used during EAS communication. In our troubleshooting it was determined that Apple's manipulation of the organizer field is against the ActiveSync specification. However, ActiveSync will not stop iOS from doing this regardless of the fact that it is "against the specification." ActiveSync will happily accept the change and write the properties from the mobile device even if the ActiveSync spec says that Exchange explicitly should not do this. The end result: Apple claims that it's Microsoft's bug because ActiveSync lets it happen. Microsoft claims it's Apple's bug because they wrote code that makes it happen. Microsoft says they "told Apple not to do this but they did it anyway." Ultimately, we were of the opinion that it was Microsoft's bug to fix since the specification laid down rules of this nature yet is unwilling to enforce them. We pointed out to them that this seemed to be a security issue. They disagreed. Like I said, I spoke to my old colleagues and they confirmed that the problem still exists and with iOS 6, the meeting hijacks appear to have worsened. They are still in the planning stages of Exchange 2010 so I cannot comment on whether or not the calendar repair agent helps this issue in that particular environment. Thanks to our reader for contributing his experience. If you've got specific details on troubleshooting this issue or have run into it yourself, please let us know.
Exchange calendar oddity in iOS 6 may trigger meeting cancellations [Updated]
The iPhone's support for Microsoft's dominant email and calendaring Exchange platform is an essential part of iOS's appeal to business users. Integrating MS's ActiveSync mobile device connectivity into Apple's gear, which started back with iPhone OS 2.0 in 2008, helped make the upstart smartphone into a viable alternative to the dominant BlackBerry ecosystem (and look how that worked out). Update: See Thursday's post for more firsthand information on how Exchange and iOS have a history of not playing nicely. Unfortunately, ActiveSync has always been a mite quirky on iOS. While the core email sending and receiving functionality usually does as it should (with sustained support for push email a sometime exception), calendaring doesn't always fare as well. Delegation of calendar rights, access to third-party calendars and meeting invitation handling are among the sore spots that may cause issues for power users. It now looks like iOS 6 may be exacerbating some of these challenges. MacRumors highlights an internal memo from a "very large company" asking employees specifically not to upgrade their devices, as there may be some situations where declining a meeting invitation inadvertently sends a full cancellation notice to all the other attendees. In fact, I've seen this behavior before, only very rarely -- it came up once or twice on both iOS 5.1 and from iCal under OS X Lion over the course of a few months, while working with Exchange 2007 meeting invites -- but the current instantiation seems to be easier to trigger. Meetings with large numbers of attendees may be more problematic, and/or meetings where the organizer and the recipient are not part of the same Exchange organization. What can make this sort of issue more frustrating for both IT and device users is that these issues are usually intermittent, hard to reproduce and may hinge on very particular combinations of circumstances and Exchange microversions. There's a reason Microsoft sells expensive service and support contracts with its infrastructure products, and also plenty of reasons why hosted Exchange and alternatives like Google Apps are gaining ground on traditional in-house installations. You may be eager to try out the latest and greatest version of iOS, but if you're depending on your company's IT department to support your connectivity to the enterprise calendar system (to say nothing of VPN, file services, email and all the rest) then please do yourself a solid and check with your local gaggle of geeks before you upgrade -- not afterward.
The Mog Log: It's the countdown
On November 1st, it's the end of the world as we know it. I'll let you know then how I'm feeling. All right, the game will still be online for another week or so, but November 1st is the last day that any progress is getting saved. You can go ahead and ignore Final Fantasy XIV after that last server photograph, unless you had an urge to spend all of your gil on airship rides but couldn't bear the thought of being broke. Not that you'll even need to worry about that after September 29th if you're not currently subscribed, as that's the last chance for people to come back even if it's just for a short period of time. It's hard to avoid looking forward to the end of the game as it stands, and the fact that we have a precise timeframe only exacerbates the problem. We've got 45 days until the ending hits, and while I've already talked about what to do with the time you have left, there are questions that need to be asked as we look at the numbers.
Battleground Call to Arms not just for weekends anymore
Patch 5.0.4 introduced a new battleground schedule in which there is always a Call to Arms battleground instead of weekends only. The Call to Arms changes every Tuesday and Friday, so that players can earn bonus honor every day of the week. You may ask, "But, Robin, why aren't all the dates covered in that calendar over there? [points to the right sidebar]" Well, I'll tell you. The new Mists of Pandaria battlegrounds have already been scheduled on the in-game calendar, even though they won't be introduced until September 25. We are currently showing only the BGs that can be played right now, but we are also showing when the Temple of Kotmogu and the Silvershard Mines will be the Call to Arms BGs after launch. You can always verify the current schedule by viewing the in-game calendar. Just make sure the Battleground Call to Arms filter is selected from the filters dropdown menu at the top right of the calendar. It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!
ZAGG intros a pair of Bluetooth keyboard cases for the iPad, three pairs of gaming headphones
Sometimes at trade shows we see funky-looking Windows 8 devices, other times we see bags filled with a morphing rainbow colors and sometimes we see things whose importance falls somewhere in the middle. That's the situation ZAGG finds itself in this week, as it tries to win attention at IFA amid dozens of laptop / tablet hybrids and 84-inch TVs. The company is in Berlin as we type this, showing off the new ZAGGkeys Pro and Pro Plus, two Bluetooth keyboard cases for the iPad. Both have a magnetic closure, but the Pro version adds backlighting. Those will be available at the end of September for $99 and $129, respectively. Additionally, the company announced a trio of Caliber gaming headphones, including the Stealth, a pair optimized for mobile devices, and the Axiom, which works with Macs, PCs, the Xbox and PS3. Both have in-line controls. Rounding out the list, there's the Vanguard, which offers 7.1 channel audio. Look for these in October, for $60, $90 and $130, respectively. The PR's embedded after the break, though you won't find much more detail there, sadly.
Apple's calendar subscriptions servers unavailable to users [Updated]
For years Apple has made available their own and third-party calendar subscriptions on their iCal Calendars site. Now Apple has appeared to have taken their iCalendar subscription servers offline. The servers host iCalendar files which anyone with an app that supports the iCalendar (ICS) standard can subscribe to. iCalendar files can be used in popular apps like Calendar on iOS and OS X and Google Calendars. Subscribable calendars are an easy way for people to add a mass amount of data -- like holidays or sporting team events -- to their planners. Once subscribed, the calendars automatically update when any changes are made on the server side. I've used two of Apple's own iCalendar subscriptions (for US and UK holidays) in my calendar apps for many years, but over the last few days I've noticed that the subscriptions were showing a refresh error warning icon. After trying to refresh the calendars manually an error-1 dialog request started appearing. To be clear, Apple links many calendar subscriptions on its iCal Calendars site. The only ones that are affected, however, are the ones hosted on Apple's own calendar servers (for example, those beginning with: webcal://ical.mac.com/ical/xxxx.ics). I've reached out to Apple for comment to see if this is a temporary issue or if they'll be shuttering their iCalendar services for good. Users who are currently subscribed to Apple-served iCalendars will still see events in their Calendar apps since the last time it was refreshed. However, if you delete the subscription, with Apple's iCalendar server currently offline, there will be no way to get the entries back. Update: As of 7pm GMT on 08/21/12 Apple appears to have put their iCalendar servers back online.
Mac 101: Use Spotlight for quick review of Calendar events
Here's a quick way to browse Calendar events (I still want to say "iCal") in the Finder with Spotlight. Simply enter your search keyword into Spotlight. The results are sorted by type, as usual. Move your cursor over a matching Calendar result and a pop-up appears, showing the event's placement in Calendar, as well as other surrounding events from the day. Click any event in this pop-up window to jump right to it in Calendar. Note that this works with iCal in Lion as well as Calendar.app in Mountain Lion. Sorry, Snow Leopard users. To extend your Mac calendaring fun into the menu bar, check out Fantastical or QuickCal.
Facebook redesigns Events listings, makes you an even bigger jerk for forgetting someone's birthday
Facebook, that tenuous connection between ourselves and the many casual acquaintances we've amassed over the years, has just rolled out a better way to keep track of events. Now it's possible to plan that witty annual birthday greeting months in advance, thanks to the new calendar and list views on the social network's Events page. You can also see suggested events and respond to invites from the comfort of the same page. The roll out follows the introduction the new Google+ Events page late last month, so now the two social networks can avoid awkwardly bumping into each other at parties. Update: Looks like weddings and celebrations are getting overhauled, too. Clearly, it's time to get down.
Apple tests new iCloud beta features
Developers who are enrolled in the iOS 6 beta are now able to see a new iCloud Beta portal at beta.icloud.com that is complete with new versions of Calendar and Find My iPhone, as well as two new iCloud additions -- Reminders and Notes. The expected timeframe for the general release of the new iCloud features is the same time that iOS 6 launches -- this fall. Changes that are apparent in the beta (according to a post on MacRumors) include a revision to Find My iPhone that shows the approximate battery life of the device you're trying to find, a web version of the iOS Notes app complete with yellow lined paper, a web version of the iOS (and soon OS X Mountain Lion) Reminders app. Apple announced during the WWDC 2012 keynote that more than 125 million people now use iCloud. It's good to see that all platforms -- OS X, iOS, and the Web -- will have nearly identical apps by this fall.