iPhone 3.0 How To: Easily Subscribe to US Holidays, Sports Team Schedules, Movie Release Dates, and More!
iPhone 3.0 features Calendar Subscriptions, where you can enter the URL for a shared calendar and near-instantly add it to your iPhone.
That’s all well and good to share a family or business calendar, but what about more wide-ranging ones? What about national holidays, religious events, movie release dates, sports team schedules? Luckily, Apple’s already made this simple for Mac OS X iCal users, and even more luckily it works just as simply for iPhone 3.0 users as well.
We’ll share how, after the break…
Adding Subscription Calendars
Just point Mobile Safari on your iPhone to: http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/calendars/. Apple provides categories for Most Recent, Most Popular, Alphabetical, Staff Picks, plus a handy search box. Once you find a calendar that interests you, click the Download link.
Your iPhone will ask if you want to subscribe (see image above), and once you confirm, will offer to take you straight to your calendar events to see what’s new.
Viewing Subscribed Calendars
Each subscription is given its own calendar in the iPhone Calendar App, so you can choose just that calendar to view. All views, month, day, and details are supported.
Removing Subscribed Calendars
Not all shared calendars are created — or maintained — equally. Movie Release Dates doesn’t seem to include June or July yet (making it rather useless at the moment), though national holidays and others seem quite up to date.
If you subscribe to a calendar that later disappoints, just head on over to Settings > Mail, Contacts, Calendar. You’ll see all your subscriptions listed under Accounts. Choose the one you want to edit or remove, and hit Delete Account if it displeases you.
Share Your Favorites
If you have or find any great shared calendars, please drop a comment below and let us know about them!
I have..."
June 24th, 2009 at 9:18 am
This is truly an awesome post.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:26 am
OK… Why is this not working for me? Ive got 3.0 and I follow the instructions. After I clock on the link, nothing happens. Am I missing a setting?
June 24th, 2009 at 9:41 am
I have exactly the same problem as msimpson – I click and nothing happens…
IPhone 3.0 too
June 24th, 2009 at 9:42 am
Not working on my iPhone 3GS, instead I get an error “Download Failed: Safari cannot download this file.”
June 24th, 2009 at 9:45 am
Well it worked somehow for me .I don’t know, it wouldn’t let me subscribe when i clicked download ,but when i left the page in safari(iphone 2g 3.0)the subscribe window showed up and now it’s working great.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:47 am
Same problem as others. I click the Download link and nothing happens. iPhone 3G running 3.0
June 24th, 2009 at 9:48 am
If it doesn’t work the first time, reboot, I had to.
June 24th, 2009 at 9:49 am
This is awesome! I know I can do it on my Mac, but I didn’t know the iPhone can do that too! Thanks!!!
June 24th, 2009 at 10:00 am
Didn’t worked when I clicked it on my 3g but if I hold my finger on the download link as If I was going to copy it the subscribe box came up.. Might try that alot better then rebooting everything
June 24th, 2009 at 10:01 am
The process is not instant. You have to wait a bit in some instances for the acknowledgment to pop up. And there are some calendars (Moon Phase) which for some reason are not working.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:03 am
Just be patient with it. You may have to click it a couple times. Worked great for me. Will the sports teams update automatically through iCal or will I hav to download it again?
June 24th, 2009 at 10:04 am
is it me or the only up to date calender is the us holidays
June 24th, 2009 at 10:06 am
yep, doesn’t work for me either.. (OS3.0). what gives?
June 24th, 2009 at 10:09 am
FYI…for those who use Google Calendar…these ICS files can be imported into GoogCal and then sync’d to your iPhone. With 3.0, Google Sync now supports up to 25 calendars!
June 24th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Hmmm, movie release doesn’t work, how do I unsub?
June 24th, 2009 at 10:12 am
nvm, hehe
June 24th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Update: I did reboot, and it took a few tries, but eventually it did work.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:12 am
Do these sync back to iCal? Or over MobileMe?
June 24th, 2009 at 10:15 am
Update again: Some of them work, some of them say “Safari cannot download this file.”
June 24th, 2009 at 10:20 am
@msimpson
I had to click on it three times for it to work. It then popped up with a “Subsribe to US Holidays Calendar?”
Just try it a few times.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:31 am
cool now all we need are updated calenders
June 24th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Do these sync back to iCal? Or over MobileMe?
i would like to know this also is there a way to merge this calender with the mobile me one i use now?
June 24th, 2009 at 10:41 am
Do the sports calendars get updated? I have all dates from the 2008 football season.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:53 am
I had to hold down download and the pop up for “open,open in new page…” came up and i hit open in new page then it downloaded.
June 24th, 2009 at 10:54 am
For those of you that it is not working, there is a very simple work around for every calendar that I have tried so far, I have not had a single problem. I think the issue you may be having is that Safari is trying to download.
So instead, navigate to that same website from your mac or pc, copy the links into an email, you can create one email with all the links you want to subscribe to in the body of the email, send it to yourself.
On the iPhone, open the email and click on the links ONE AT A TIME, waiting for the dialogue box to popup before you click on the next. You’ll see the same box shown above, click to subscribe and then move on to the next.
Works every time
June 24th, 2009 at 10:56 am
i like how all the calendars are from 07
June 24th, 2009 at 11:06 am
Now the calendar App needs to allow you to show only certain calendars at a time and hide others. I would like to have my favorite baseball team schedule available, but I don’t need to see it all the time, I’d like to be able to selectively view it when needed. Otherwise I have little dots on every day and they usually do affect me on a daily basis.
While I’m suggesting something…how about a landscape week at a glance view instead of the list view?
June 24th, 2009 at 11:12 am
calendars seem very dated, and not many of them are up to date..
June 24th, 2009 at 11:44 am
You can also do this with the public Google calendars. Simply find a public calendar you like (I prefer Google’s holidays calendar to Apples since it goes more years ahead and includes more holidays) and email yourself the link to the iCal (http://www.google.com/calendar/ical/usa__en@holiday.calendar.google.com/public/basic.ics for example).
Open the email on your iPhone, click the link, and it will ask you if you want to add it.
I prefer this method to adding all of the holidays to my actual google calendar (done via importing the above link) since it shows them as a different color even on the phone.
I presume this would work for any site that allows you to get a public iCal file.
June 24th, 2009 at 11:48 am
@Calavera302:
I just found this site, which provides a ton of iCal style calendars. I haven’t tried, but presumably, all of these could be subscribed to from an iPhone.
June 24th, 2009 at 11:51 am
@Calavera302
Forgot to actually post the site: http://www.icalworld.com/
June 24th, 2009 at 12:26 pm
**Another Workaround is to open a second blank page in mobile safari and the download pops right up!
June 24th, 2009 at 12:42 pm
Another source of Calendars is Google Calendars. They have some public ones, (rather limited).
But you can create a special calendar and share it with others.
And of cource, you can push events (invitations) to other people’s calendars, which arrive in their email. If that happens to be a gmail account, you can add it to the calendar right from that Email.
oh, and @d.allen:
How very droll… ;-/
June 24th, 2009 at 1:17 pm
@icebike..
by droll.. did you mean troll.. lol.. I love my iphone, so.. no, that wouldn’t be me.. I’m not sure what I was expecting I guess.. after all.. its just a calendar.
Glad they brought this to the attention of folks though, like I said, if they were updated, this would be really nice.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Ok, so I have MobileMe and subsribed to a bunch of calendars from my mac… is it just me or do my subscribed calendars not sync over MobileMe?
June 24th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
it took me awhile.. but now I got it icebike.. lol.. sorry..
June 24th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
It worked perfect for me, 3G S running on 3.0 (obviously)
June 24th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Am I missing the search box? I see the normal iTunes store search, but it doesn’t return calendar results.
June 24th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Damn… never mind. That iTunes store search actually works fine. Calendar results just don’t show up in the quick search drop-down.
June 24th, 2009 at 2:24 pm
Awsome!!! I have the 3GS n it worked…I downloaded a few…..
June 24th, 2009 at 2:43 pm
Now would this be a better way to sync my google than using GoogleSync?
June 24th, 2009 at 2:44 pm
You can add calendars manually by on the iPhone by selecting “Settings” > “Mail, Contacts, Calendars” > ”Add Account…” under “Accounts” Select “Other” at the bottom select “Add Subscribed Calendar” (or CalDAV for CalDav calendars, like Google), then paste in the URL to the .ics file. Worked fine for me, adding my F1 calendar
Although this is a fairly convoluted process Apple, thanks! Surely you’d think you just click the link to the .ics file in Safari, but no!
F1 calendars are here BTW if anyone wants them: http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/motorsport/formula_one/calendar/default.stm
June 24th, 2009 at 3:00 pm
Running on iPhone 3G 3.0 Jailbroken, and it works perfect for me. Awesome!
June 24th, 2009 at 3:55 pm
Just did it with no issues. Awesome find!
June 24th, 2009 at 8:02 pm
Anyone get the Steelers to work????
June 24th, 2009 at 8:37 pm
Nice, I was doubting that calendar subscriptions would be useful in a non-business setting.
Chris: I subscribed successfully to the Patriots calendar, but there’s nothing on it yet. I would imagine it will be updated as the season approaches. I have mobileme though, so I think mine will update automatically when the schedule is added. I’m not sure how it works without mobileme.
June 25th, 2009 at 12:57 am
I had to double tap the link and then it worked (odd) but I’ve got all the US Holidays on my iPhone now
yay!
June 25th, 2009 at 9:39 am
This feature is awesome. I’ve been using the Firefox plugin ReminderFox along with the free icalx.com site. Now I can get the icalx calendars synced to my phone! Perfect!
June 30th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
How can you change the color of the subscribed calendar events? On iCal on the Mac, you can get info and change it, but I could not find a way to do it on the iPhone.
July 7th, 2009 at 11:02 am
The problem with some of the calendars is that the ics file that the link points to is zipped (*.ics.zip) and it seems like mobile safari can’t handle this. Anyone know a solution?