One of the features that the late, great Steve Jobs talked about in June at the iCloud introduction was calendar sharing – keeping your wife/partner up to date could be easier than ever before. Well, I decided to give it a try.
I’ve been running iOS 5 betas since June and upgrade to iCloud about a month ago. It wasn’t until this week that my wife upgraded her iOS devices. It was time to see how this all worked.
The first place I checked was on my iPad. I searched around for some kind of sharing option. No luck.
I did eventually find it though – on iCloud.com. Here’s a quick step-by-step:
1. Make sure you have upgraded your Apple ID to iCloud / setup iCloud. Both the sharer and the ‘sharee’ need to have iCloud accounts.
2. Go to iCloud.com with your computer and login with your credentials. Open the calendar app.
3. In my case, I created a new calendar, though you can share an existing one too. On the left, you’ll see the calendars listed, each with a little circular symbol to the right (sorta like an RSS icon, if you know what that is). Click that.
4. This will give you a sharing panel. You can choose ‘private’, specifying the email address for the person in question.
5. The recipient will get an email, asking them if they’d like to subscribe to this shared calendar. They say yes and they will be directed to their iCloud account. Once confirmed, the calendar magically appears on all of their devices. It just works.
Now anything you add to this shared calendar appears on both devices. Here at home we’re using it for travel plans and the like.
Comments
10 Comments so far. Leave a comment below.In step 2 you say “go to iCloud.com and log in”. But this just takes me to the iCloud welcome screen. I have already updated the iPad and MAC with current OS and enabled the iCloud services on the individual machines. iCloud.com doesn’t give me a login option. Can you give me another hint? Thanks.
Ah – sorry if this wasn’t clear… You have to visit iCloud.com on your computer, not your device.
Hey Jim, I was able to set up a shared calendar with the significant other, but we both realized that neither one of us are getting alerts for new events each other has created, unless we review that calendar. I would think that we would be getting some type of notification informing us that an event has been added to the shared calendar. Do you have any additional info?
I don’t think you get notifications of new events, no.
If I share my calendar with my husband, does he get the pop-up alerts that happen prior to the event (I typically have alerts happen 15 min prior to the event).
I believe so, yes – the alarms are part of the sync’d event. They seem to fire in my tests.
Is there a way to protect the calander? If I delete something off my calander and it deletes off my wife’s all is well and seems to be correct. But, what if I delete my whole calander on accident? Is it saved somewhere. Same with notes that are synced between my iphone, iPad and iMac?
Any way to turn OFF the alarms for shared calendars? I want all the alarms for events on my calendar, obviously, but my wife doesn’t need to be pestered by them. In the old Calendar world where we shared/subscribed via a private WebDAV server we could opt out of sharing the alarms/alerts and to-do’s. Is this still possible?
I got the shared calendar to work. Thanks for the great instructions. When I create an event, it shows up on her iPhone quickly. I set an hour before alert and it goes off along with my default alert of day before (I get two alerts). Works as anticipated.
However on my wife’s phone, the hour before alert I set does show up on her calendar for that event. Even her default alert settings of 2 hours before does go off.
Is there a way for the alert to go across with the event? And a way for it to fire off the default alert on the other side as well?
Sorry, I mean to say that the alerts do not go across to my wife’s phone. Not the alert I set with the calendar event nor the default alert. Only way for her to get alerts is to check her calendar regally, edit the event and manually set an alert herself. But the 2nd default alert still doesn’t go off.