[SalesForce] Date formatting issue in Apex

According to the documentation

Attributes of a date type will accept dates in various formats, such as 1/1/2005 or January 1, 2005. All dates are stored in the format MM/DD/YYYY, and if a date is entered in a different format, the system will convert it to the proper format when storing it.

I believe 2014-01-24 23:46:13 UTC fails because it's not expecting a UTC time, and 24/01/2014 fails because the format is DD/MM/YYYY.

Hope this helps!

If you change your inputtext to inputField, then it will work. In this case you would not need the onfocus="initialiseCalendar(...)"

<apex:inputField id="birthdate"   
                      rendered="{!NOT(dobOp)}"
                      value="{!contact.birthdate}"/>

Otherwise, if you want to use a custom date picker, then change your inputtext to input and add type="date"

<apex:input id="birthdate"
                   type="date"
                   rendered="{!NOT(dobOp)}"
                   value="{!contact.birthdate}"
                   onfocus="initialiseCalendar(this,'{!$Component.birthdate}')"/>