Filed under: Internet Tools
Google Calendar CalDAV/iCal syncing now official
Although the plumbing has been in place since the summer, it's always nice to have an official announcement, and now we do: Google has gone on the record with its support for CalDAV syncing from iCal to Google Calendar. You can now gracefully sync your editable Google calendars with your (Leopard-only) iCal, keeping a local copy of those events in the cloud.Granted, both BusySync (which adds Bonjour-based iCal synchronization between Macs) and SpanningSync (which includes Address Book --> Google contact sync) have been handling this task with aplomb for some time, and they offer something Google hasn't -- a nice GUI for picking your sync options. That too has been addressed: Google Code is hosting the Calaboration sync setup tool, a basic checklist of calendars to add to your iCal setup.
If you are syncing your iCal and gCal data via Google's support for CalDAV, let us know how it's going.
Get a WordPress.com Blog
![TUAW [Cafepress]](http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.tuaw.com/media/tuaw-cafepress-promo.png)
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
saurabh said 7:42AM on 12-02-2008
really so cool
more updates
joine us
Reply
Andy said 7:23AM on 12-02-2008
I've been using this for a while and it works nigh on perfectly. Sometimes I get 'Calendar unavailable' errors from iCal but either leaving it or restarting iCal always brings them back. I would like to stop using Mobile Me and this is a first step towards it, contacts have been a bit more problematic though, syncing with Google always adds loads of rubbish duplicates, anyone know of a more reliable way to keep contacts in the cloud?
Reply
Jash Sayani said 9:22AM on 12-02-2008
Same here. Have been using it from quite a long time... Works perfectly except the errors sometimes.....
NIck said 5:16AM on 12-03-2008
In Gmail click 'suggested contacts' and delete the lot, this is the list of harvested email addresses, then sync, there may be a little manual editing but the conflicts should be resolved on sync. Works fine here.
Ozzy said 3:49PM on 12-06-2008
Been using plaxo to store contacts in the cloud and there sync tool to update yahoo, google, outlook and macos address book. Been working fine since March.
Ben said 7:30AM on 12-02-2008
If I set this up with a calendar and then sync with my iPhone am I still prevented from creating events on the iphone?
Reply
David said 12:16PM on 12-02-2008
I've been wondering the same thing. Is Apple crippling the feature because they want people to use MobileMe? Or is it a natural shortcoming of CalDAV?
jrflesch said 6:12PM on 12-02-2008
Amen Brother!
This is exactly why I use Calgoo Connect.
Charles Martin said 7:33AM on 12-02-2008
I set this up and then synced with my iPod Touch (iPhone users pay attention). All of my calendars transferred to my iPod Touch. However, I am unable to add new entries to any one of them. Nor am I able to edit any item in one of the calendars. Pretty much useless when synced with my iPod Touch as the point (to me) was to be able to make changes in any location and have it updated on all of the others.
Reply
Bob said 9:58AM on 12-02-2008
Try Nueva sync. I've been using it for a few months now and love it. It lets you wirelessly sync your ipod/iphone calendar with Google Calendar and add new events.
Charles Martin said 10:04AM on 12-02-2008
NuevaSync sounds great... except it is for the 2nd generation iPod Touch (at least that is what I believe iPod Touch 2.0 means). I have one of the original ones.
Charles Martin said 10:06AM on 12-02-2008
Nevermind.. had I actually gone to the Common Questions first, I would have seen that the 2.0 references the software on the iPod Touch, not the generation number. Apple couldn't have made it more confusing when talking about these things.
Fred said 7:40AM on 12-02-2008
How does this work with accessing Google Calendar from iPhone? Can you make changes, and how do they propagate to Google Calendar?
Reply
Randy said 10:22AM on 12-07-2008
Sadly, no. I've been using caldav support since it was announced. The way it works is you point ical to your google calendars, then when you plug in the iphone/ipod touch, the calendar entries move to the device. There's no way that I know of to wirelessly sync directly to the iphone/touch.
Chris G. said 7:38AM on 12-02-2008
If you can't edit the calendars on the iPhone, then it is useless to me.
Reply
Nawaz said 7:43AM on 12-02-2008
I'm using this currently, but the trick is to use Neavusync to sync you iphone to gCal directly so you can create new events etc in the gCal and these then get synced to your mac via this CalDev link. i.e. iCal gCal via CalDev and gCal iPhone via Neavusync.
I also do contacts similarly but I havent worked out how to get AddressBook to sync to Google Contacts whithout allowing the iPhone in the actions directly (but via Neavusync instread). Maybe I'll swap contacts to sync from iPhone Addressbook and Addressbook Google instead.
Reply
MDrummer88 said 8:05AM on 12-02-2008
I set it up last night and was not happy to find out that the copy that is saved in iCal slows up iCal significantly, and still will not sync to mobileMe and iPhone. Back to CalGoo Connect for me. Waste of time last night.
Reply
LT said 8:07AM on 12-02-2008
I've been using it for a couple of months and it's been working fine for me. Syncing works both way for free! Like a previous comment sometimes there is an occasional error trying to connect with Google and I did get a bunch of duplicates in the beginning. My biggest complaint is that I can't select that calendar in iCal when editing an event or am I doing something wrong.
Reply
Le Big Mac said 12:11PM on 12-02-2008
Agree--and don't underestimate this problem. It's huge to me. the iCal integration of gcal is imperfect. It treats each google calendar (or from each google account) as totally separate, so you can't move events from one to the other. Also, you can't accept meeting/event invitations into a google calendar, only a "local" one.
If you have only one calendar, gcal/ical works really well. But once you have more than one, not so much (or it's limited in functionality).
James Fee said 7:57AM on 12-02-2008
The problem for me is that I have mobile me and I already have an exchange account set up on the iPhone. The Google calendars don't sync over mobile me and I can't set up a Neavusync because you can only have one exchange account at a time.
So close, yet so far.
Reply