Alarms are a great feature of iCal and the MobileMe Calendar; alarms can help keep you on track for your various daily activities. However, there's currently a bug with MobileMe that prohibits you from creating an alarm that will alert you more than two days in advance of the scheduled calendar item. We found a simple work around that can help you until this bug is fixed by Apple.

We noticed that when creating alarms for calendar items in iCal today, there appears to be a bug surrounding alarms more than two days in advance of the calendar item you're adding. When we tried creating the calendar item above, we were quickly prompted with the following error message.

We were quick to spot a simple work around. The work around just involves quickly editing the calendar event to reflect the new alarm date in advance of two days.

1. Create a New Event

Create a new event in your calendar, filling in the data as you wish. For the alarm field, however, create an alarm for only two days in advance of the calendar event.

2. Let MobileMe Sync

After a few seconds, the event you just added to your calendar will sync up to the MobileMe cloud. You can tell MobileMe Calendar is finished syncing when the small spinning wheel beside your account name stops.

3. Edit the Calendar Item

Now when you edit the calendar item, you can change the date from two days in advance, up to seven. Anything after seven days will still give you the error message, but at least you can get alerts up to a week. We know this is not much of a work around, but it is still better than nothing.

4. Alert Apple to the Problem

We just found this problem and immediately contacted Apple to see if they could offer a solution. They were not aware of this problem, but there are probably more than a few MobileMe users being affected by this issue. If this is an issue affecting you, contact MobileMe support to let them know your calendar alarms are not working properly.

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