Mountain Lion changed the way event alerts are handled from the way they worked in Lion. I didn’t have a default alarm set in iCal in Lion and always manually set an alarm for those events I wanted to be reminded of. After updating to Mountain Lion all events didn’t have an alarm set anymore in Calendar (the new name for iCal).
I noticed this when my iPhone, which is still on iOS 5, alerted me to an event but neither my iPad (which is on iOS 6) nor my MacBook Air (running on 10.8.2) showed me one. Checking the event in Calendar on the MacBook, I noticed that the event indeed didn’t have an alert set. Nevertheless, one had fired on the iPhone and technically that event should be the same since I sync with iCloud. So what was going on here?
While I haven’t gotten to the bottom of the issue, for now I have solved it by setting a default alert in Calendar’s preferences. Changing this from None to 15 minutes before resulted in all existing events without an alert being updated accordingly. So changing this setting apparently not only affects events you create in the future but all existing events with no alert set.
From what I’ve read in Apple’s Discussion forums, there seem to be some bugs related to Calendar event alerts in Mountain Lion and/or iCloud and/or iOS 6. People are reporting all kinds of issues, not just missing alerts. Bugs like this are why I usually never install a .0 release of OS X and rather wait for at least the .2. Given that the current version of Mountain Lion is 10.8.2, it’s quite disappointing that a typical .0 bug like this still hasn’t been fixed.
Potentially Related
- Backing up the new MobileMe Calendar
- Custom Keyboard Shortcuts Not Working for Preview, TextEdit and Others in Lion
- TerminalColours SIMBL plugin under Lion
- Ben Brooks on Lion’s supposed gesture problems
