iCal Dock Mystery
Every once in a while a problem comes along that even a Google search can’t help with. Starting up iCal on my Mac was taking forever and I could see this little red dot at the top of the icon in the dock that was running up some numbers — well into the 200s — before it would even allow me to use my calendar. It took about 30 seconds and I’m not a patient man. I tried deleting calendars I was subscribing to. I tried deleting recurring events. I even went so far as to delete previous events that had passed. I knew it wasn’t to-do items, because I don’t use that feature.
Searches for things like “red dot ical dock” and “ical red slow dock” and so on didn’t bring back much except the never ending complaints about the date on the icon in the dock not reflecting the true date (fixed in 10.5, I believe). So I’m here to report on the solution. It’s unacknowledged / unconfirmed invitations. After taking several passes at this without success, I was desperate enough to go into a backup of the ical files and do some manual deleting, but decided to take one more look and I noticed that there was this little icon that looked like an inbox with an arrow pointing down into it and it had a red dot with an exclamation point — just the sort of obvious clue I’d been looking for all this time!
So, clicking on that icon brings up a list of all of the invitations you haven’t confirmed. Some I would click on and it would give me a warning at the email address the invite was sent to was not in my address book under the “me” entry (i.e., the entry in your address book that is identified as you). Some were from old jobs or contracts, so naturally I had deleted those addresses from my book. Once I added them back into “me” the notifications problem went away. The rest, I just delete the events since most were so long ago. Somehow all of the invitations had reset in my iCal at some point along the way making all this pain necessary. Go figure.
