Quick Tip: How to get birthdays in Calendar 53
Fri, 13 Nov 2009 11:29 am EST 
If you were to ask us, we’d have your contacts’ birthdays all show up automagically in the calendar, like they did in the Palm OS of old. But it isn’t happening, and if you want to get around that, where there’s a will there is indeed a way. Reader weldonhd3 showed us two ways to get your birthdays into Calendar, dependent upon where those birthdays are coming from. Truly, weldonhd3 is a genius. And forgetful when it comes to birthdays. They go hand-in-hand, really.
First up is Google. Your Google contacts that have associated birthdays can be pulled into your Google Calendar and then synced down to your Pre. All you need to do is open Google Calendar in your desktop browser, click on Settings (top right corner), then Calendars. In the middle right of the page click on “Browse interesting calendars,” select the More tab, and then click Subscribe next to the “Contacts’ birthdays and events.” After a few hours the calendar should be added to your phone with the magic that is Synergy. From there, if you ever add a birthday to a Google contact it should appear in the calendar and be pushed back to the phone.
But that depends on you to do the work of entering birthdays. And work is unacceptable, right? You have Facebook, and your friends have mostly entered their birthdays into their profiles, so why not get it on your Pre? Through the magic of Facebook apps you can do it, though it lacks a bit of the automagic synergizin’ that we want. Here’s how it works: add the Birthday Exporter app to your Facebook profile, export to an iCal file, and then import it into Google Calendar.
Voilà, birthdays in calendar!
53 Comments
Pimp.
cool....thanks!
I've had my own birthday calendar for a while, but wanted to use the built in google one.
Has anyone figure out how to add reminders/alerts for the google based ones?
frustratingly enough, there is no "notifications" menu option on the calendar it generates, nor is there a "notifications" tab in the settings for that calendar either.
I knew Kessler was smart! It's because his birthday is the same day as mine.
also you can you fbcal.com for both events and birthdays...currently using...
@linh...if you go to settings for the calendars...you should see a link for Notifications for almost all calendars..choose the appropriate link..on the next page there's a default section, add reminders accordingly..pop-up will pop-up on both the phone and on the web site if you are logged into to google, the others are self explanatory
hope that helps
Just noticed signing in that I now have been a member of the central forum for 10 years.
anyhow, has this birthday thing always been in calendars? nice find.
now if we could get the football schedule to show up on my pre.
That's easy! From your Google calendar, Click "Add" under "Other Calendars" on the left side, then select "Browse Interesting Calendars". At the top, select Sports -> Football -> National Football League - NFL, then select "subscribe" to whatever team you want the schedule for.
Or you could check your NFL Mobile Live app as well.
thank you so much!!!thats awesome!
That works for getting the schedule on Google Calendar, but for some reason doesn't transfer to my Pre, grrrrrrrr. What's the deal with that?
same is happening to me :/
Birthdays has updated (imported from facebook) but this is not :(
just looking at the setting of each calender, the imported sports ones are only "html" all the other calenders that work on the pre are "xml, ical, html" so maybe that has something to do with it
I am still waiting for palm to support the google sports calendars.
its not palm. the google sports calendars dont sync to anything.
then google needs to get on the ball. If the birthdays cal works on the pre why wouldn't the sports ones? thats just weird IMO.
fbCal.com is better as it produces a webcal calendar you can subscribe to from your Pre (or Google Calendar or whatever), so that the birthdays from Facebook are always up to date (rather than having to repeatedly export the iCal file every so often).
Does this mean I can use Fbcal.com to keep my google calendar up to date, then have my pre sync to my Google Calendar? Would that produce multiple instances of a Birthdate if say I have a birthday stored in google and the same one in Fbcal.com?
Yes to your first question; that's how I've been using my Pre w google and Facebook's birthdays since forever. As to whether you get duplicates...I haven't noticed any--it's possible that I've just missed seeing them--but I'm going to guess no. It's been a great system. The only downside is the general potential downside of Synergy as it's currently implemented with regard to FB--you get the birthdays of *all* your FB friends.
Is it possible you could please please provide me with the instructions on subscribing to a fbcal.com calendar directly from your Pre? I have subscribed through Outlook on my cpu, but it won't go into my actual exchange account, it is a separate account in Outlook. I'd rather just subscribe directly from my Pre, but I don't see that option.
Thanks.
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"Truly, weldonhd3 is a genius. And forgetful when it comes to birthdays. They go hand-in-hand, really."
Ahahaha, too true! This is awesome work for gHeads, but I'm still a bit loathe to jump on using gEverything. Would be nice if Synergy just pulled in FB birthday listings to the calendar automagically. Maybe in v1.4? You out there, Palm?
The title should be changed to "How to get birthdays in Calenders if you use Google Calender"
For the rest of us, this is useless.
Also - I noticed that my birthdays that synced from Outlook will not go past 1970 - so it shows as both my mom and dad as 1970!
You can thank Unix Time for that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix_time
So, Google Calendar is free. Even if you only used it for this it would be no loss to you.
technically, you have to use google contacts as well, because the calendar pulls birthdays from your google contacts only.
Yes, if you don't have a FB or Gmail account is there another way to add birthdays into the calendar besides manually adding them into the calendar?
cool. It'd be nice if the pre did birthday reminders natively (or does it? I don't have mine with me right now). Since you put a date in, it should be able to also tell you how old the person is as part of the reminder (I love this feature of my timex usb datalink)
used the export/import method with facebook and google calendar. awesome stuff.
Nice tip, I was just adding birthdays to my Calendar as repeating events. But connecting them to Contacts like this is nice. Although there doesn't seem to be any way to get reminders on the birthday calendar ... any hints on that?
Can anyone tell me how to add an anniversary not a birthday?
Does Facebook have a particular Calendar APP that we are supposed to use with synergy. If we have I've been asking this since June 6th, and no one has an answer for me. I can pull my contacts from the FB website, and I have yet to see a default calendar.
sweet!!!
All my Google Contacts have everything about that person. It's to bad when you sync your contacts to the Pre the phone doesn't bring over the contacts DOB, Spouse, or Child info.
The Google Contacts --> Google Calendar is a better option for me personally, because I don't necessarily care about the birthdays of all the folks I am friended with on FB. Using Google Contacts, I can only add the birthdays for people that I care to remember (Family, Friends, select co-workers, etc.)
This is CRAP!!!
I'm not doing all that just to get the calendar to do what the previous Palm OS did.
I miss it but not to go and manually set this up and set that up.
I wish that all the people that are making things like this would allow you to choose the list of people you want to export/import/etc. I want my personal "Friends" list that I made, not the FB Friends list with all the Mafia Wars people on it. :P
/Kevin
What I want to know is why dont the birthdays of your contacts that are already in your phone show up in calendar?? Contacts not comng from google or facebook but entered directlt into the phone?
Thanks for the instructional Derek, worked fine.
Since I don't have google calendar - the next best thing is the Birthdays homebrew app. It's a little slow to load (as it is searching all the contacts/bdays) but will give you a nice list of when and how many days left to go for all your contacts.
maybe it's nice for people who commits their precious contacts frivolously to internetkraken google, but i don't trust google (and facebook et.al.), so i'm looking for a local possibility to get my (over 200) birthdays from my contactlist in outlook/palm desktop.
This is why it is worth regularly checking Precentral - awesome, thank you and thank you synergy (less than 10 mins before birthdays in my phone).
Also easy to share with my wife so better than previous Palm OS.
This doesn't work for me. I know the sports calendar doesn't sync. I have Christian Holidays which show up on my Pre, but not Birthdays contacts and events.
My birthdays aren't showing up on my Pre either...
Weird. I have the Yellow Birthday Calendar on my Pre but none of the bday entries are showing up on my Pre or vice-versa?
None of my other google calendars show up on my pre. They just show up in the google calendar on my pc. I tried both exporting my facebook birthdays into google calendar as well as fbCal.com. The Jewish & American holidays don't show up either or my sports team schedule. I see them on my computer--just not my Pre. If I change the calandar to them on my pre (upper right where there is the all button) nothing comes up on the date. Can someone please tell me how to fix & get these on my pre??? PLEASE????
Are these separate google calendars? If so make sure you have them in your view all category. Are you can always click the Arrow next to all to even see if they are in the menu. If they don't show up in that menu I won't be able to help as I'm not that tech savvy.
If it is there and you want it in all views click Calendar View Options in that menu than just turn On Display in "All Calendars" view.
Did that. still do not appear. Got the fb birthday calendar running on my pre, but can't get any of google's alternative calendar;s running. They are there, but no info transfers.
Great article. I've had this for awhile, found it in the forums.
I would like to delete the exported facebook birthdays from my google calendar so I can try fbCal.com
Anyone know how? Just looked couldn't figure it out yet.
The problem I have with this is that it put the event from 1201am to 1159pm instead of an all day event. I can manually go in and change that as I come across them but you would think there was an easier way. Next time I make a calendar just for birthdays in google so that way I can easily ignore it if I'd like.
wondering way all my f.b birthdays show up on google onlne but, not transfering to my pre...when I check my calendars list it shows contacts have came to the phone but, not showing on the calendar screen
fbCal.com birthdays now appear on my pre, but even if I have that calandar's pup up off, they give me a warning at 12 midnight. Only way around it is ti change everyone by hand. Tried disabling series and future in series, but you can only turn off the pop up one by one. And still can't get any google calendars like holidays to appear on my pre. If I switch from all to their category, it's blank. :(
Sweeet. I was wondering how to do that!
Has anyone noticed that for a given date with more than one contact, only one contact is shown to have that birthday.
Also, the calendar app, after the google calendar sync has slowed to almost a grinding halt!
Feedback would be nice please.
I'm much more interested in how to get birthdays syncing from Google to my Pre contacts...
Awesome! Worked like a charm. Thanks so much for sharing.