Product Review: Apple’s Calendar is a piece of crap

by J. E. Brown, senior C++ developer and testing fanatic, PunchCardReader.com

Negative Review of Apple's Calendar App: After using iCal in Lion, I felt sure the software couldn't get worse. I was wrong. Here's my laundry list of Calendar's disappointing features:

Calendar in El Capitan suffers from Delayed Event Syndrome:
• Today I scheduled a reminder to myself to take something off the stove after 90 minutes. The time came and went. 20 minutes after my event time, I started wondering why the event never came up. At the very moment I clicked Calendar to open it, the alert appeared, 23 minutes late. This has happened before.
Hey Apple: Fix your damn garbage. Or as Steve Jobs used to say, “This sucks.”

Some Calendar events never appear at all. Calendar creates an event, but never adds the so-called "default" alert at T minus 3 minutes.
It doesn't happen every time — probability is involved. So some alerts fire and some don't.
Hey Apple Programmers: This bug was easy to find. You don't even USE your own apps, DO you?

Calendar for El Capitan suffers from a bug which causes it to delete my work. Calendar repeatedly strips alerts from my pre-existing recurring calendar events. Events I have used for YEARS suddenly stopped working in Calendar for El Capitan. Even though I add those alerts back in, Calendar deletes them. Example: My weekly reminder to Charge my Kindle so that the battery is ready for a weekend hike. On 083118 the alert was missing from the event, causing no event to pop up, causing my Kindle to run out of power during a hike. This reminder (with an alert) has been in my calendar for many years, beginning with iCal for Lion; however Calendar for El Capitan keeps deleting the alert from the event, silencing it, causing scheduling problems for me. (see screenshot)
Hey Apple: Fix your goddamn bugs.

Calendar violates the Checklist Metaphor, in which event notifications should not go away unless and until they are cancelled, postponed, repealed, or marked done. In other words, user acknowledgment and response is a necessary handshaking step in the disposition of an event.
Calendar simply leaves each event on-screen until its Ending time, and then, Calendar disappears the event.
As a result: If I oversleep or if I get to my computer late in the morning, alerts which fired while the computer was asleep have already expired and disappeared by wake time.
This results in forgotten tasks and missed chores.
Unforgivable.
Apple doesn't get it, and never has.

Feature Removal: Calendar notifications can no longer be snoozed by a selected menu of time delays. The only option in El Capitan is "Snooze" and the time delay is not advertised up front. The user is left to guess.
Hey Apple: Was the old solution too good for you?

Volume level of event sounds is non-adjustable. Tiny pipsqueak sound effects don't get anyone's attention.
Hey Apple Engineers: Grow a pair: Stop making wimpy, apologetic sounds and start making sure I hear you.

Maybe there's a bigger issue here: If even Apple can't write software for its own platform — if Mac OS is so unstable and so brittle — what chance do the rest of us software developers have?

Twenty years ago, I was planning to write my own calendar app. But I didn't, because I assumed Apple would fix the remaining problems. (bitter, heavy sigh)

Workarounds: I suggest users look into the Unix sched command. When coupled with Apple's speech synthesizer, sched gives you audible alerts and never fails. Try these in any Terminal or X11 window:

    % sched 12:00 say "It's 12 o'clock noon."

To get a 10-minute warning on important events, type:

    % sched +00:10 say "SpaceX launch in 20 minutes. SpaceX launch in 20 minutes."

2^nd edition 17 Apr 2019
1^st edition 13 Sep 2018

Copyright © 2018-2019  J. E. Brown   all rights reserved.

In the secret city of Los Alamos, New Mexico USA.