iPod won't sync calendars with colons in the name
 

I sent the following as a feedback email to Omni but I thought I would post it here too in order to see if anyone else is having this problem.

I can't believe that I'm the only one to have noticed this but I don't see it mentioned in the forums. I tried syncing my iPod with the newly created context calendars in iCal so that I could get my OmniFocus tasks to show up. No dice. I went crazy trying all sorts of things including deleting the calendars and then recreating them, trying to create them by hand before syncing with OmniFocus, changing their names before syncing, trashing all my iCal prefences, etc. That led me to realize that whenever I created a calendar with a colon in it, just as OmniFocus does in it's calendars, then it would refuse to sync. I wondered if this was just a problem with my iPod because to be honest it has had some issues syncing music and photos in the past but then I found an article on the Apple support site that warns of this very problem. [URL="http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301374"]http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=301374[/URL] (see 2 in the Notes)

Are you guys doing this on purpose to prevent iPod syncing in alpha? If so, have you mentioned this anywhere because I haven't seen it.

Sorry, we weren't aware of this problem.

We plan to make the prefix a preference, but now that we know about this problem we'll try to find a better default setting.

Thanks for the quick response and on a weekend!

So I guess I was the only one to notice this problem so far. Strange. I suppose iPod syncing is amateur hour for all the PDA wielders out there.

Well now that I've offered some apparently useful feedback I feel like a real alpha/beta tester and not just a freeloading lurker.

Ah... is this why the Context is no longer in the Task description in iCal?

It used to be Calendar:Task [Project]
Now it's Task [Project]

I'd like it to return, I have so many calendars, lord knows which one [I]that green[/I] is... or at least be an option, minus that there colon of course.

How about a dash -, or a greater than > or a user-defined, but not permitting the colon.

It appears that the problem is still happening as of build 88103, as the calendars created by OmniFocus have the "OF:" prefix.

I thought I was going crazy, trying to figure out why my To Do list on my iPod wasn't syncing up, until I figured out that the "OF:" calendars weren't being transferred.

> It appears that the problem is still happening as of build 88103...

[bump] Still a problem in 88193.

You might want to make sure this is fixed before 6/29 -- I'm guessing more than a few new iPhone users will want to take the OmniFocus love on the road... :)

I have changed the preference to something other than a colon and the iCal calenders have not reflected the change. any suggestions?

I would also like to see this made optional. I would also like to see the ability to name calendars based on the full context hierarchy (so e.g. errands > groceries would create the calendar "errands - groceries" or similar, and not just "groceries"). Most generally, we could rename the synced calendars as we saw fit (in an OmniFocus inspector for contexts, in iCal and have OmniFocus figure out the issue on sync, or finally by being able to explicitly pair any context with a manually-created/named calendar in iCal).

This is still a problem for me. But, I am seeing it manifest in the Zimbra iSync Connector. I get an error stating the calendar contains illegal characters. Unfortunately, the connector can't even pull in the calendars with the colons so I can deselect them and make the sync disregard them. Any chance of removing the colon any time soon or at least making it a preference?

Rather than automatically creating a calendar for each context you have, OmniFocus will soon let you choose which calendar to use for each context. (Thus, there won't be any more calendar naming issues because OmniFocus won't be naming any calendars.)