iCal has always been an elegant program. Though it has a "subscribe" function for public calendars, it hasn't always played nicely with other devices and other calendars. This limitation forced many a user to seek greener pastures elsewhere, like Google Calendar. Calendars created in Google's web app permitted a better cross-platform solution for home and mobile use, but made iCal clunky and hard to use, even when you only subscribed to your own Google calendars.

Recently, Apple enabled CalDAV subscriptions on the iPhone (which also play well with Google Calendar); that made me dust off my copy of iCal and take a second look. If you're not using iCal at all, you may want to take a moment to learn about what you can do with it.

The idea of calendar subscriptions is simple: store a calendar event database somewhere online, and then provide a link in a common format for calendar programs such as iCal to access. The calendar program then imports the calendar data and puts it in your calendar, updating itself at a frequency of your choosing.

Online databases of public calendar links abound, and you can add calendars from your local little league schedule to stargazing guides to the galaxy in your area. The format that Apple uses is the "ics" format, and you'll see calendars with that extension all over the web.

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.

I'm a pretty big user of Google Calendar, because I like how I can automatically sync it with my BlackBerry. The problem for me has been that on my desktop, I really prefer iCal's interface. Syncing the two can be cumbersome. We've written about third-party programs that can sync iCal and gCal together in the past, and although those are great -- I have still wanted a native way to sync the two calendars together.

Well, fortunately, Google has just quietly introduced CalDAV support to Google Calendar. CalDAV is the protocol that iCal uses to transmit data over the web. Although some other mail and calendar programs support CalDAV, right now Google Calendar is only compatible with iCal. Finally, iCal and Google Calendar can sync without having to use third party programs!

After following Google's detailed instructions, you can add your Google calendar account to iCal. Any changes you make in iCal will be transferred over to Google and appear in Google Calendar within about 15 minutes. Likewise, any changes made in gCal will be updated immediately from iCal. If you use a BlackBerry, which also syncs directly with gCal, those changes will be updated on all sides as well.

So does this mean that third-party syncing utilities have no place? Well, just based on my initial tests this morning, they are safe for at least a little while. Although sync support works perfectly, you have to create a new calendar account for each individual calendar you want to access. Additionally, if you have a calendar called "Home" on your Mac and a different calendar called "Home" in gCal, you can't just sync those two together. You'll need to either import all your iCal data into Google first, and then sync with the new calendar, or transfer the information over from one calendar to the other within iCal. Programs like BusySync and Spanning Sync allow syncing of designated calendars with one another.

Still, this is a huge step in the right direction and I'm just happy that I can import my mobile calendar onto my desktop without having to run a background utility. CalDAV support for Google Calendar requires Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard's version of iCal. The Google Calendar service is free.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in.

[via Google Operating System]

You hate Entourage, and you're not particularly fond of iCal. You've waited endlessly for Nighthawk, Contactizer Pro is too complicated, and you want a native app instead of using Google Calendar or another web calendar. And, since you're saving money for an iPhone 3G, you don't want to spend any money on a calendar app.

Maybe it's time to look at Mozilla Sunbird 0.8 for Mac OS X. It's developed by the same people who brought us Firefox and Thunderbird. It's almost identical to the Lightning calendar plugin for Thunderbird, but doesn't require that email app to run. Upon first startup, Sunbird will import events and tasks from your existing calendar application.

The UI is plain and simple, probably because this is a multi-platform application (Windows, Linux, and Solaris in addition to Mac OS X) that shares a lot of code between the different flavors. Sunbird can tie into CalDAV servers such as the one in Mac OS X Server 10.5, and can subscribe to any .ics format shared calendars. In limited testing, Sunbird felt responsive in searches and was quite stable for betaware.

Sunbird, of course, is free. If you are searching for a new calendar app, give it a try.

Kerio Technologies announced version 6.5 of the Kerio MailServer -- 2 years in the making -- yesterday. We talked about version 6 recently, but this is their largest update yet and clearly shows their readiness to take a bite out of the Microsoft Exchange market. With version 6.5, Kerio is providing the groupware platform and tools needed to completely replace Exchange within a collaboration-centric organization.

The release is compatible with both server and workstation flavors of OS X with full support for Leopard, in addition to being fully Microsoft certified for Vista and Redhat certified for Linux compatibility. 6.5 also includes enhanced support for Entourage 2008, making full use of message flags and "out of office" messages which are synced on both mobile and workstation clients.

The biggest change of interest to Mac users is the addition of CalDAV support. Kerio users can look up information, share and subscribe to calendars and achieve 2-way sync whether they're on a Mac, an iPhone, a Palm or Windows Mobile handheld, a PC ... you get the idea. The server can provide a bridge between open and proprietary standards, making sure that you see the same data everywhere and allowing for smooth cross-platform interoperability.

The other major improvement, definitely of interest to users in multi-platform environments, is an upgrade to the Outlook Connector with a complete rewrite of its underlying database structure. It allows for easy data access, online and offline, with current and older versions of Outlook. And its full-text search capabilities search across messages, contacts and calendar events with support for Google Desktop search.

Not surprisingly, a release this big resulted in a pricing change. The standard package (10 users) now starts at $499 and adding additional users costs $20 per user. A version with integrated McAfee Anti-Virus for bi-directional scanning of all email starts at $599 and additional users are $24 each. Both versions include anti-spam, user management with authentication against Active Directory and Open Directory. Visit Kerio for more information.

Update: The US Apple Store is now carrying a base server (10 user) license and install media for Kerio MailServer with McAfee.

Apple's iCal Leopard page reveals that the upcoming Leopard version of iCal will support a subset of CalDAV, the distributed authoring and versioning calendar protocol. CalDAV allows collaborative creation and maintenance of shared calendars and events. With the new iCal, you won't have to send around a memo saying "give me your open dates in November". Instead, you can use iCal's "Auto Pick" capabilities to select a meeting time when everyone is free using their shared CalDAV calendars. (And, if your office uses an iCal room reservation system, you can even pick the room and block out the time you need it.) Of course, this new technology only works if everyone in the office--including that Jim-guy in the corner office who still refuses to switch from Windows--is in on the calendaring system.