There are a few nuances in synchronizing our apps with the new iPhone and iPad calendars in iOS5. We hope these get cleared up in subsequent updates to iOS5 (there’s nothing we can do from our end) but here are the basics:

Before you sync

Make sure that you have a group of calendars in your iPhone or iPad called either “From My Mac” or “From My iPhone (or iPad)”.  This is because – for some reason – iOS5 requires us to first establish a sync connection with calendars that are local to your device.  You can sync to external calendars, but you must FIRST have the local calendars.  I know it sounds strange, but that’s how it works. Once you have set up calendars “From My Mac” or “From My iPhone” or “From My iPad” then you can sync SmartTime, SmartCal, and SmartPad to ANY of the calendars that are on your device, including iCloud and Exchange.

It’s This Simple:

  1. Disable external calendars
  2. Establish “From My Mac” or “From My iPhone” calendar group
  3. Sync once.
  4. Re-enable any external calendars
  5. Sync again.

Details:

1) First, make sure that any external calendars (such as iCloud, Exchange, GMail, Yahoo) are disabled.  To disable, go to your device Settings -> Mail, Contacts, Calendars -> select the Account, then switch “Calendars” to “Off”. There is no need to Delete the Account.  You will get a message that says “Are you sure you want to continue?  All (Gmail) calendars will be removed from your iPhone.”  Select “Delete from My iPhone.” Don’t worry, you can bring these back later simply by switching the Calendar back to “On”.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2a) To set up calendars “From My Mac“, simply connect your device to iTunes then sync your calendars.  This will sync with your iCal calendars. After doing so, go back to your device calendar to check; you should see a section called “From My Mac” with all of the calendars that you sync’d from iCal.

Or…

2b) To set up calendars “From My iPhone” (or iPad), just go to your iPhone or iPad Calendar. Make sure that you do not have any other calendars set up. Then in your iPhone or iPad calendar, select “Calendars” then “Edit” then “Add Calendar…”.    Create any new calendar, then in that calendar create one appointment.  This may sound strange, but that “flips a switch” somewhere in the iOS5 calendars that says you have data in a calendar that you created on your iPhone.

3) Now, enable any external calendars that you with to sync with, such as iCloud, Exchange, Gmail, etc. You should now be able to sync to those calendars TO (and from) SmartTime, SmartCal, and SmartPad.

More Calendar Quirks

When making these changes to your iOS calendar, it helps to wait a few minutes in-between actions.  Sometimes the changes take a while to “compute.” For example, when you enable a set of external calendars such as Exchange, in Step 3 above, you should get a message that gives you an option to “Keep” or “Delete” local data on iOS. Choose “Keep.” However, sometimes you will not get this message.

Syncing to External Calendars

Once you’ve gone through the steps above, any calendar that you create in SmartTime, SmartCal or SmartPad will create a calendar with the same name in your iPhone or iPad calendar. However, that will NOT create a corresponding calendar in any external calendars such as iCloud, Google or Exchange.  If you use external calendars such as these, you must first create that calendar in the external calendar, then sync it to  your iPhone or iPad calendar. SmartTime, SmartCal and SmartPad will then automatically import that data and any subsequent changes are sync’d both ways – that means you can create a new event in SmartCal and it will sync thru to Google calendar via your iPhone calendar. But only after you first create that calendar in Google calendar and make sure it is sync’d to your iPhone calendar.

A Note about Tasks

Note that SmartCal and SmartPad sync Tasks with Toodledo, but that all Tasks and Events share the same Project Category. So if you create a new calendar in Google called “My Google Stuff”, and if you sync that to your iPhone calendar, it will create a new calendar in SmartCal called “My Google Stuff.”  The next time you sync SmartCal with Toodledo, a new Folder will be created called “My Google Stuff.” It will likely be empty, unless you created any tasks in SmartCal.  You can just ignore that folder or, better, use it to also create tasks that sync with SmartCal.