iCal suckage: can't rename calendar

I found out why I can't name a calendar in iCal "Mason" today. This had been kinda bugging me, since my name is Mason.

Apple's sync service (currently named "Mobile Me") is nice when it does work. In my experience, it seems to be pretty reliable after you get it set up and working, but it does tend to shit all over itself every time I buy a new Mac or iPhone, and try to add the new device to my sync group.

Last time, it corrupted all my keychains irrecoverably, the first few times I attempted to add a new Mac Pro to my sync group. I had to restore from my backups from five minutes before, several times, until it somehow just worked. (Same steps each time.)

Today, I tried to add my new laptop to the group of Macs that syncs my stuff. Instead of syncing my calendars, it decided to:

a. not get any of the calendars onto the new MacBook Pro

b. create a bunch of random duplicate calendars, and propagate them to the other machines that do sync

So the end result was that my new Mac did not have any of my calendar data on it, but all my other Macs and iPhones now had a bunch of useless garbage magically added to them. (Wow, the power of the cloud.)

So, anyway, in the course of trying to debug what the fuck could be wrong, I decided to manually tidy up my iCal data. In the course of doing this, I saw that because:

a.) I have a mail account in Mail.app whose name ('description') is "Mason"

and

b.) At some point, Apple decided to let us put todos and notes in our email accounts

...iCal silently fails to rename or create any calendar named "Mason". If you have a Mail.app account named "Dick" that has any of these stupid note or todo turds lying around in it, I bet you cannot create a calendar named "Dick" in iCal. And so on.

As soon as you press Return to end editing, iCal just silently reverts the name to "Untitled" or whatever the name was before.

I personally think that the forced breeding of iCal and Mail has produced some pretty fucking ugly offspring, but that's a discussion too boring to have. I just wanted to note for the record that I found out why iCal would not let me name my calendar with my own name.

(As a final aside, I have an email account with the name of my company, and iCal lets me make a calendar with that name. I suspect this is because that email account does not contain any note or todo turds, and so iCal has not silently reserved the name. But I won't waste time testing this.)

KEYWORDS: iCal sucks, iCal won't let me rename my calendar, iCal rename fails, iCal calendar name, iCal can't rename, and iSync shits all over itself for the umpteenth time!