Saturday, May 24, 2008

I know what's wrong with Google Calendar sync

But when I tried to report it, and thus answer their problems, I got this message:
Oops!: "Something bad happened. Don't worry, though. The Spreadsheets Team has been notified and we'll get right on it."
I suspect the log I uploaded was too long -- I have about 1300 events in my calendar.

Google calendar sync engineers messed up recurring events that extend across a daylight savings time transition. Google keeps the absolute time the same for entire length of the recurring event, so the local time shifts on one or the other side of the DST transition.

I hope they've figured this out on their own, because their feedback mechanism is broken too.

Incidentally, while solving this one, I discovered a few other bugs.
  1. If you delete an email account from Outlook 2003, all appointments have a dangling reference to the missing identity. Google Calendar Sync can't handle the dangling reference. The fix is to create a new email account, then start and quite Outlook a few times. It clears the dangling reference.
  2. If a sync fails due to bug #1 Google Calendar Sync's local cache is still udpated. So future attempts to sync even after fixing bug #1 don't work because GCS thinks nothing has changed. You need to delete all the local data stored in Application Data (see initial reporting link for the path).
So I found 3 bugs, each significant.

Too bad I can't tell Google!

3 comments:

Hinbit Development said...

Hi,
Ive encountered that bug (#1) as well
Do you know if they took care of it ?
Thanx
S.

JGF said...

No, they haven't. I wonder if they've given up!

Pankaj said...

Have you tried >HyperShare for synchronizing Outlook calendars with online calendars? It also includes synching for mail, contacts and tasks.