Troubleshooting iCal: Reminders forgotten if not active

We've received several reports regarding iCal recently, indicating reminders are lost/skipped if iCal is not active when a reminder is scheduled to appear.

Joe Kehoskie writes:

"Let's say I have an appointment for March 30 and a reminder set to appear 5 days in advance. If I don't launch, or already have iCal launched, on March 25, the reminder is totally skipped, instead of appearing the next time iCal is launched. I believe the latter would be much better -- I'd rather have to disregard overdue reminders than miss an important reminder simply because iCal was inactive at the moment a reminder was due."

On our in-house Power Macintosh G4 and other tested systems, we have never encountered this problem, but the number of corroborated reports was sufficient to warrant further investigation.

To begin with, there is an application called iCal Helper.app located in /Applications/iCal/Contents/Resources/. This small, low-resource program launches every 60 minutes, and check for reminders that are intended to be displayed within the next hour. This application has caused some problems of its own, apparently causing the crash of some Classic applications when automatically run.

So without the launch of this helper application, reminders may not show up at the correct time - or at all. If an event happens too close to startup, or your iCal Helper.app has been damaged, no alert will appear.

In order to workaround this problem, you can add iCal Helper.app to the Login items section of System Preferences.

It is also important to note that iCal and Microsoft Entourage are not compatible, and attempting to use their reminder systems in tandem can cause problems.

Feedback? Late-breakers@macfixit.com.

Resources