Showing Remember The Milk events in the iPhone calendar

I’ve been using Remember The Milk for a few days now and I am really impressed. One thing that is missing is the ability to show what tasks are due on a certain day when browsing the calendar, because Apple haven’t opened up the calendar API. However, it is incredibly easy to add this feature.

iPhone OS 3.0 brought the ability to subscribe to remote calendars using iCalendar or CalDAV. Remember The Milk publishes a read-only view of your tasks via. iCalendar.

To begin with, login to Remember The Milk and proceed to the tasks overview page. Make a note of the link highlighted in the picture below, with the text “iCalendar (Events)”. Note that you don’t need to copy the part after ?tok, or it would be very long to type into the iPhone!

Remember The Milk iCalendar export

You should end up with a link like this:

www.rememberthemilk.com/icalendar/username/12345678/events/

Make sure your username and the unique number are correct. Now head over to your iPhone and follow the steps below.

  • Open Settings and choose “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”
  • Choose “Add account…” and then “Other”
  • Choose “Add Subscribed Calendar”

Adding a subscribed calendar

  • Type in the link you got from the Remember The Milk website into the “Server” field and select “Next”
  • The iPhone should now tell you the account requires a username and password, use your Remember The Milk credentials (the same as for their website) and press “Next”

Confirming iCalendar account details

  • If the phone says “Subscribed Calendar account verified”, you are good to go! If not, double check you have an internet connection and that the link, username and password are all correct.
  • Press “Save” and head back to the iPhone calendar
  • Find a day where you have a task due in order to check it worked. On my phone, they appear as red events

Remember The Milk events in the iPhone calendar

Don’t forget to subscribe to Remember The Milk! I will probably do so in a few days, it is a really useful service.

David Cannings
David Cannings
Cyber Security

My interests include computer security, digital electronics and writing tools to help analysis of cyber attacks.