Color of Appointments in Calendar

A bit old now, but in case anyone else reads this and wondered:-

You cannot manually add birthdays in iCal. This is a special Calendar that is automatically created from birthdays entered in AddressBook (and maybe Contacts on the iCal device).

I have the same issue...I do not have a Mac with iCal... I do not even have desktop at the moment... The Gmail calendar does exactly what you are looking for, and maybe you can sync using ITunes... worth a try

The confusion seems to be coming from the use of certain words. When making a new calendar is referred to it gives the impression that another complete calendar will be made, not so. Click calendar on the upper left corner of the open calendar app. Each calendar is named and a color is chosen by you. No matter if if you make two or five all event entries will be shown on one page. You do however when making a new event assign it to the calendar who's color and name you want the event to be. When making the event or editing it look down to calendar and it opens to all the ones you've made touch the one you want and it appears on the calendar page with the right colored dot and bar for the entry. Hope this helps everyone. Point is each entry can be any of the colors available not just blue.

You can change the colors of your iCloud calendar categories but not on the iPad as far as I can tell. I went to iCloud.com from safari on my apple laptop (looks like you can access iCloud.com from other browsers on pcs as well) and clicked on calendar once I logged in with my iCloud account info. Then on the left hand side of the calendar screen you have your categories, I clicked edit just above those then if you click on the plus sign you can add categories and change the colors of them by clicking the colored dots next to each category. For example I have a blue dot next to my family category, purple for work, red for Appointments, etc. you can do custom colors as well like hot pink or coral or whatever. All of this is through my iCloud calendar. I have iCloud set up on all of my devices so I am able to access all of these categories from my iPhone, iPad, computer etc. I hope this helps, though it is a bit late from the main post.

Edit: looks like you CAN infect do all this from iPad. Go to calendars app click calendars button in top left corner, click edit in top right corner of drop down menu, click on add calendar under iCloud section and add a category name and choose your color. To change color of existing category or "calendar" as app calls it just click on that category and change the color. Hope this isn't too confusing.

What stinks though, that custom colors do not seem to sync. For example, If I want to add anniversaries on my Mac Calendar app, can choose from the color list, but if I hit custom and pick gray for example, that color doesnt sync to the Apple Mobile Devices - wierd.

I seemed to find the answer to custom colors. If they arent "sticking" on your ios devices, then go to icloud, and uncheck the calendar check box, and then re-check it. This will re-sync the data, and also sync the new colors.

This worked for me with my calendars (i.e. the calendars I own). However, there is one calendar I am subscribed to (with edit abilities) that does not sync a custom color to my iOS 9 devices. With this calendar, I can change it to Aluminum on my OS 10.10 Calendar, and it stays. It syncs to iCloud, but then not to iOS - even after this technique of unchecking and rechecking on iCloud.

I subscribe to some family & friends calendars that I like to show as a gray color - to make them distinctive from the colors I have chosen for my calendars.

And by infect I mean in fact, darn autocorrect

THANK YOU Hdaenitz, this was driving me nuts!