Hello all,

Having an issue that I don't see a resolve for in the knowledge database, was hoping someone here could help.

Whenever I create a new timed event in iCal and sync it to my Palm Treo 650, the time shows up on the Palm with a -5:00 behind it and the time zone is Havana. Both my Mac and my Palm are on New York time zones, so this is baffling me (especially since Havana doesn't even appear to be a choice!)

Am I missing something? Somewhere else I can look?

Thanks!

I hope you get a reply. I am having similar problems that I thought were related to the change of daylight savings time in that for the next 3 weeks after the time change all of my appointments are off by 1 hour on my Palm but are ok on iCal on the desktop. Time Zones are turned off on iCal and the Palm is set for central. For some reason, those appointments that are off by an hour have time zones on the Palm as American Belize. Please, I am just a redneck and have no idea where that even is. Anyway, I can't fix it in iCal as I don't have time zones turned on, and even when I tried to turn them on things got even worse in that all my appointments now had CST, CDT, or some other zone appended and now all were off by an hour as far out into the future as I have anything scheduled. Turned time zones off in iCal and synced and got back to just a 3 week problem. Tried to correct them on the Palm, but they just get off by an hour again at the next sync. Palm didn't have an answer other than I should use Palm desktop software.

Hi jt3writer

I'm glad that it's not just me experiencing this. What's funny about it though is that my calendar entries JUST started doing it this week (or possibly last week). I don't have either iCal or my LifeDrive set to use time zones (my time zones are set, but the preferences are turned off). I'm in the same time zone, but my prefs are set to Toronto.

All of the named locations (Havana, New York, Toronto) use the same time zone, five hours earlier than UTC (hence the -05:00) and with Daylight Savings Time when appropriate. There is no standard, official list that names the various time zones; one list (the one used by Java, which is not necessarily related to either the MacOS list or the Palm list) has 32 different names for this same time zone. User controls (such as the Palm date-time preference setting, or the iCal time zone drop-list in the upper-right corner) have to make their own guesses as to which name will be most familiar to the user.

What appears to be happening here is that the time zone gets set by the offiset and DST usage (the only standarfd, portable way to do that), communicated to the other device, and then the other device has to guess which of the 32 possibilities to show to you.

The only reason I end up caring about this is that it shows up on the Treo in Agendus.

Anyone figure out how to just tell it not to show any timezones?

I'm on my way over to their forums to see if I can find a solution.

There was already a discussion going on about it, but no solution as of 2007-01-25:

http://support.iambic.com/forum/showthread.php?t=24582

for others who might want to chime in

You actually cannot tell iCal to ignore time zones. The option is misleading; it just hides/shows the time zone control. All your events have a time zone associated with it and that could be the problem as you don't have your device set to use Time Zones. I'd recommend turning on time zones on the handheld (I can't actually recall a way to turn it off).

We've done a lot of work with time zones and it appears that while we're matching the right offset, we're selecting the wrong city. Are you sure your desktop and device are set to the same city? On the desktop, turn on iCal time zone support and from the popup, Choose America/New York as the time zone and see if that helps.

Thanks for the reply sgruby; unfortunately no matter which combination of settings I use it ends up the same.

This has finally seemed to work for me (for now). I am actually halfway between New Orleans and Memphis. It seems that you can't just select US central, you have to select a city for both the desktop and the palm. The Palm has New Orleans, the desktop (OS 10.4. has Memphis, but iCal has neither. One that all three had in common was Chicago, so I selected it for all 3. Sunrise and Sunset times will be off, but that is a minor issue if everything else is now back to normal. I then opened iSync and reset sync history and had iCal overwrite .mac and the Palm. I have performed a sync since and everything has stayed at the right time. Prior to performing all of these steps, I had tried one or the other individually, and always on the next sync, times were off again. Hopefully this time it will hold. I don't know why it got out of whack to begin with. I have not had any problems like this for the years I have been using MS, iCal and my Palm without ever having to pay any attention to time zone issues in the past. Hope this helps.

PS. One thing I forgot to add in the above post is that before I did sync after resetting sync history, I did enable "Use time zones for all new items" in the Palm calendar preferences as Scott suggested at the same time as selecting Chicago for the default city, again, the only one that they all seemed to share. You can apparently turn time zones off or on in the Palm

This is a really annoying problem. I shouldn't have to mess around with any of my time zone settings unless I move around from time zone to time zone (which I don't) I have tried the suggestions listed which has helped some, but I've still got some appointments that are messed up. I would say this is most definitely a bug in the program that needs to be fixed.

After spending a half a day on this problem, I believe I have figured out the issue. The daylight savings time information on the device is wrong for the United States beginning this year. Until Palm issues an update, you need to change this information yourself.

On your device do the following:

1) Go into Prefs
2) Select Date & Time
3) To the right of Location, tap and select the last item in the list "Edit List..."
4) Select your time zone, i.e. New York
5) Tap Edit
6) To the right of start, tap and set it to be the Second Sunday in March
7) Tap OK
8) Tap to the right of end, and set it to the first sunday in November
9) Tap OK
10) Tap OK
11) Tap Done

I've tested this and it appears to work.

Scott - thanks for all your hard work but now the problem almost seems worse. I have completely reset/cleared out my Treo 650 - reset iSync and done a fresh Sync...no everything is off by about 2 hours or so. When you did this...did you have Time Zone support enabled in iCal? Do you have Time Zone support (or whatever it's called on the Palm) enabled on the Palm?

Sorry Scott...scratch that. I'm an idiot I changed the end/start for daylight savings as you mentioned for my timezone but then I failed to actually set my device TO that time zone (I assumed it did that after I made changes to my timezone but it did not). Again, thanks for your hard work on this and my apologies for being a moron.