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iCal default alarm

I have iCal preferences set up to automatically create an Alarm 15 minutes prior to the scheduled event. When an event is set up as "all-day", the alarm will go off at 11:45pm the prior day. This makes total sense on why Apple does this and it is pretty obvious that a user can change the alarm start time. However, if my preferences have been set up that my day starts at 8:00am and ends at 5:00 (my work day), wouldn't it make more sense that an event that you create as "all-day" default to an alarm start time of 8:00am (user start time preference) and not at midnight. Why would I want an alarm to go off at 11:45pm when I'm in bed sleeping? It would make more sense for the alarm to go off at 7:45 am (15 minutes prior to my day start preference).

is there a defaults write com.apple.iCal setting that I can change to make this happen?

MacBook Pro 15", Mac OS X (10.5.6)

Posted on Jan 16, 2010 11:06 AM

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3 replies

Jan 30, 2010 1:57 PM in response to Marlinespike

No response from anyone from Apple on this. I did find that you can tell iCal to set a default alarm +- minutes. So If you set an all day event and want the alarm to go off at 8:00 am, you would go into iCal preferences and set default alarm to go off -480 minutes. That works good for all day events but the thing that stinks is when you go to set up a new event that only lasts from say 4:00pm - 5:00pm, this default setting will set an alarm 8 hours AFTER the time. Not what you really want. So, the answer I'm afraid is to go into each event that you need an alarm set, and change the alarm time manually. I'm hoping this will change in a future update due to the many MS people that don't like this default setting.

iCal default alarm

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