Set snooze duration for Mountain Lion notifications

some of us never upgraded 😝

@ubernaut: Wise lads and ladies! I weakened, and bought a retina-display MBP that came with 10.8.1 installed. I have only recently discovered that it will actually boot from 10.7.5 on an external HDD. Now for the fun, of doing a clean install of 10.7.5 onto the internal flash, and then seeing it it will work without a hitch. 😉

crossing my fingers for you i wonder if you can find an old version of safari 5 to go with it. please let us know how it goes.

I have now given up any hope of Apple sorting this out and I have installed Busycal http://www.busymac.com/busycal/ which has sorted out all my problems. I had months of missing appointments, because of not being able to customise my alerts. I have sent feedback to Apple about the problems I have been having and I have searched optimistically for updates to iCal in the App store. None has been forthcoming.

You can try Busycal for free for a month. I cannot begin to tell you how disappointed I am with Apple at such a horrrible design flaw in iCal and at their apparent laissez-faire attitude to its users.

I am equally disappointed. The ongoing total stony silence on this issue on which there has been so much correspondence can only be interpreted one way: they no longer care what their customers think. What an unfortunate turn of events!

On the new Calendar in Mountain Lion I just noticed that there are not two ways, but three ways to interact with the reminder pop-up window - you can click on "Close" or "Snooze" buttons, or click anywhere else other than those two buttons and it brings up that event in Calendar ready to modify the alert that caused the pop-up or even add another alert.

I agree with you it seems not as useful as iCal on Lion and previous versions of the calendar program, but in some ways it's more.

Another new feature is that in the Preferences there is a new pane that lets you set the default alert pre-warning for each account for three class of events - normal events, all-day events and birthday events.

It's one more click than before (maybe more depending on what you want to do), but the added advantage of the default alert is something I'm liking more and more. You can even set it to None if you don't want a default - I think this was the way iCal worked before when creating new events.

So what I do when the pop-up appears is click in the main body of the pop-up to bring up Calendar with that event already opened, then set a second alert that is the period of time I want to be reminded next. So now you can specify any sort of reminder rather than the fixed list of choices that iCal gave you before - which is something I've always wanted an easy way to do.

This new behaviour seems to be a compromise of giving you the ability to specify any length of reminder combined with the ability to immediatly dismiss the event (by clicking "Close") or snooze for a few minutes (by clicking "Snooze"). I still hope that Apple lets you specify the period of the "snooze" if you want - perhaps with a "defaults write com.apple.Calendar DefaultSnoozePeriod 600" Terminal window command or something like that (600 would specify 10 minutes in this example).

I think a better solution would have been to have the click on the "Snooze" button bring up a list of reminder periods like it did before with the added option of being able to modify that list according to your own desires by clicking somewhere other than Snooze or Close.

Anyway, after using Calendar for a while I'm getting to where I'm not as upset as I first was when it appeared that we had completely lost the ability to as easily modify/create a new alert if desired as iCal had previously let us.

Try it out and see what you think.

-Bob

it's an interesting perspective personally im still in no rush to upgrade to ML but thanks for your input will be usual if/when i bite the 10.8 bullet.

Previous iCal worked this way with growl also. This new way means a whole lot more typing and clicks. It's completely inefficient and inflexible. BusyCal is doing it correctly. I'm just holding out since its so expensive and hoping Apple does something with Calendar.

@Deep Yogurt & Richard Baskett: I agree with Richard (too many clicks). Lack of documentation is/was part of the problem - when we have to rely on a MacWorld Article to explain how the latest features work. I have never used Growl and don't plan to start now. But, (finally) having read the article, I can see that it's easy to launch iCal from the notification Center, and add another alert. Actually, the sanguine thing to do is to add a sequence of alerts - at say 60, 30 and 20 minutes - in iCal, and then just dismiss them when they trigger Notifications.

But Notification Center, in its current form, is really a boneheaded solution in search of a problem. 😁 It used to be so easy and now it's not.

I'm really glad I upgraded to ML for many reasons; however, this is reeeeeeaaaaaaalllly lame, Apple. Snooze is totaly useless. Sometimes I wonder if the people who ditch features actually work in the real world.

I've just about had enough talking as well. I'm tired of hearing of betas of Mountain Lion with no attention requested of users to test Calendar or Notification Center. By inference I assume no fix for this issue is forthcoming.

Richard, I notice BusyCal is on sale right now through March 15th. This may be a good time to try it out.

Bob, we've been doing all the things you mention for many agonizing months. I have some new events with 3 or 4 alerts. However I have events in my calendar that have been reoccurring for many years; many since iCal was introduced. For those I'm constantly having to break my concentration from my job to edit an event and determine which alert I should modify or simply add another. I have to determine how far in the future the event is in order to set the correct alert. All this was a no brained in previous OSs by simply knowing I didn't need to be bothered by this alert for another [5,15,30 mins, 1,2 hours, 1,2 days] and get back to my business. I'm hoping BusyCal will remove this distraction to my productivity.

I agree that the Mountain Lion development team surely can't be using Calendar alerts to any extent or they would have fixed this, probably before the initial public release.

Thanks Randy!

I hear there's a quaint company called Microsoft that has a really good implementation of calendar snoozing. It might be worth copying. 😉

Yea, I still use Entourage for my e-mail. I have a few recurring weekly things that I have scheduled in Entourage, but not in OS X Calender for the very simple reason of the snooze.

In my mind, Entourage is the best mail/calendar program all around. The ability to create projects, assign contacts to the project, and have all of your sent/received email attached to that project makes it indespensible (I think MS did away with this feature in Mac Outlook). I dread the day when it will no longer work with Mac OS X.

To quote a previous post almost fully, but ammended, in case Apple is listening:

.....wait, I have to "snooze" something for a few minutes and I'll be back to type since alerts now dominate my life...

Ok, back:

Two things are badly, badly wrong with the notification center in the new calendar:

1. Lack of options to set snooze to remind in 1 hour, 1 day etc. just like the original iCal. This has rendered my Mac totally useless for task management.

2. Lack of options to set alert banner location. Top right is extremely inconvenient for me. I've always got stuff up there I need to access frequently in my workflow. Now I'm compelled to "snooze" various alerts incessantly to keep working or run the risk of loosing the reminder. Option to display alerts in other screen corners would be great. Of course if the reminder could be put back to the ability to select different snooze times that used to be available, the reminder display location would not be as important.

Placed my vote here: http://www.apple.com/feedback/macosx.html