BirdieSync

I have just discovered that if you don't fully specify a contact's birthday (include a birth year) on your iPhone, then it will cause a Sync Failure in the Birthdays calendar.

I have been using BirdieSync to align my calendars for many years - between my iPhone and Thunderbird, running on my Windows laptop. But I had not been using the iPhone Birthdays calendar, because I had originally created a Birthday/Anniversary calendar of my own on Thunderbird. My reason for starting to use the iPhone Birthday Calendar was to have it automatically calculate the person's age at their current birthday.

I was surprised when I started getting Sync Failures on some of these people. I have traced the problem to a Contact whose birthday is missing the Year of Birth. It is not uncommon to be unaware of a friend or acquaintance's age, so you would enter their birthday without the year. Apple software fills in a missing birth year as the year 1604.

It appears that BirdieSync treats this as an error when it reads the entry. This iPhone calendar is set to Read Only to ensure that any changes are only made on it.

Would it be possible for BirdieSync to NOT treat this situation as a Sync Failure? When running a sync, I always look out for the "Synchronization SUCCESSFULLY completed" message, to indicate that there were no problems.

Hello Mike,

I could make some tests regarding the managing of birthday dates without a year on iOS. As you mentioned it seems that birthdays without a year may be associated with year 1604. Note that if you manually enter this year in the contact birthday, the year disappears. It's the same year which is used to generate the event in Birthdays calendar. Presently BirdieSync cannot synchronize events on this period. I'll need to investigate further to see if it's possible to workaround this problem or not.

Hi Birdie,
Glad you were able to confirm what I was seeing. Even if you set the contact's year of birth to 1604 (and the year disappears), it still causes a sync failure. So I played around with some other birth years and found the following:

• A birth year of 1605 will show as that year in the iPhone contact, but still causes a sync failure
• A birth year of 1900 works correctly (my niece probably doesn't appreciate being 120 years old, but her birthday was the first I found without a year!)

I think it would be very helpful if you could investigate if a fix is possible.