Among the many changes recently made to Google Calendar, you can now add up to five reminders for events on any of your calendars, each of which can be an SMS message, an email, or a popup window. You can also set default reminders for each of your calendars.
Now when you sync events from iCal to Google Calendar using Spanning Sync, your synchronized events will inherit those defaults from their target calendar.
For instance, I have default reminders on my "Kids" Google calendar set to show me a popup 30 minutes before each event, then send me an email and then an SMS as the event gets closer. (If you've ever been late picking your kids up from preschool, you'll be with me on this.) When I create a new event in my "Kids" iCal calendar and sync it to Google Calendar, the event inherits these defaults.
I can also set up additional alarms in iCal if I'm worried about missing something really important—like the season finale of Lost.
Update: It looks like there's a bug in Google Calendar that is causing some reminders to be erroneously deleted. As with previous Google bugs, we hope and expect that this one will be solved quickly.
Update: It's now fixed.
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