IOS, OSX and Calendars

Someone needed to share a calendar with me for some common planning needs…this has been true for some years now, but today I decided I'd try to solve it again.

This should be trivially simple, but it's not. And in fact a good bit of the online help  is flat-out wrong. May have been true in the past but it ain't now.

And it should not require an Advanced Degree(™) to figure it out, on either side of the equation. Altho it used to, way back when…

Used to be that to share calendars you had to set up some weird caldav goings on. I was successful doing that once, but that was like 2004 or something. Way too hard.

If you look at:

How to Share Calendars from iPhone, iPad - OS X Daily

That's dated early 2017, you'd think that was still ok. But it's at least one full version of IOS behind. I currently have IOS 11.1.2, and what the OSX Daily page shows you in screenshots simply can't be done because the GUI has changed to remove what they show and describe.


How to do it now:

I regret that you need to do this from a Mac. It appears impossible on your iPhone or Ipad.

You have to go to calendar in OSX. Make sure the sidebar that lists all the calendars is visible.

Mouse over the name of the calendar you want to share. To the right of the name you will see a pale gray "icon" appear, that looks like the wifi icon of several circular arcs that are supposed to look like a radio signal. Click on that icon.

You now get a popup asking you to enter a contact or email:

Hit the checkbox if it's a one-way share. Otherwise, it's a common calendar all subscribers can modify.

You can enter names from your Contacts, and it matches them properly. As it should.

The recipient will receive an email asking if they want to subscribe. This went weird for me, so I don't want to claim I handled that properly. On my Ipad I got a special alert asking for confirmation and when I hit "yes" the calendar got added, and after another few minutes all the events showed up. Don't expect the events to appear instantly…

In any case, it does work, but you cannot do it from you handheld. This is stupid. REALLY stupid. Didn't matter for me, once I realized that OSX is the start point, but it you only have a phone, you are SOL.

Shame on Apple for removing that capability.