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.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
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?
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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?
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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.
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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.
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.
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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?
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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.
saurabh said 7:42AM on 12-02-2008
really so cool
more updates
joine us
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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.
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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.
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Owen Evans said 2:04PM on 12-02-2008
James,
I have the same issue regarding using both Exchange and Mobile Me, but think I have solved it. I'm using a trial of Spanning Sync and it's working great so far.
Here's what I'm doing:
Sync personal GCal calendars to iCal using Spanning Sync
Sync personal iCal calendar and AddressBook contacts to MobileMe "cloud" using MobileMe System Prefs panel
Sync work Exchange calendar/contacts to iPhone over the air
Sync personal MobileMe calendars/contacts to iPhone over the air
I also use the Google Calendar Sync (link below) to synch my work Exchange calendar to GCal just so I have everything on Gcal, and then use the CalDAV access to put that in iCal so everything is also there.
When I first set things up I also synched my work cal from GCal to my iCal as well, but then when that synced up to MobileMe it also then went to my iPhone, so I had that calendar duplicated on my iPhone -- both from Exchange and from MobileMe (via GCal and iCal). Syncing my work calendar through Exchange directly to the iPhone is preferable since I can work with calendar invites that way (which you can't do if it's synced circuitously through MobileMe).
I'm planning to get a year of Spanning Sync after my trial runs out. Thought about getting the $65 "lifetime" subscription, but I have to think that within a few years all this syncing will be worked out and I won't need Spanning Sync anymore, so I'm going to make that bet...
Hope this helps!!
Google Calendar Sync:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=98563
whitlock said 7:58AM on 12-02-2008
I've been using this feature for a while to sync my personal calendar on my Mac w/ my Google Calendar account. To sync my work Microsoft Exchange account, I installed the Google Calendar Sync program on my work machine (PC) and lock it (not shut down) at night so all of my calendars stay in-sync with Google.
It's nice.
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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.
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