Finally two way syncing between Google Calendar and Apple iCal
Ivan | Tue, 2008-12-02 22:20Thanks to Google you don't need complicated tools to set up two way syncing between iCal and Google Calendar anymore. In a few steps you can set up your online and offline calendars to display the same information.
Here are the 3 steps to take:
- Open the OS X Address book, find your own name and select the menu Card / Make This My Card. This is needed for the meeting invites.
- Download the setup tool Calaboration provided by Google and run it.
- Provide your Gmail username/password and select the calendars you with to sync and done.
It works smooth. I only hope for these features to appear soon:
- Being able to add an entry to a Synced Google Calendar on an iPhone. Currently you can't do that, you can only add an entry to the default calendar, which doesn't sync up to Google as far as I can tell. Hope you can prove me wrong.
- Being able to sync iCal to-do-list to Google Calendar. For this of course Google first has to release a to-do-list application. Until than we have the Gmail integrated RTM.
- Calendar entry with time zone conversion support.
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I've been working around this for way too long now! This is the greatest news i've heard all week!
Thanks for the great post Ivan!
Anthony
-Where did the fedoras go?
I just got rid of Google Notifier... Yay!
Anthony
-Where did the fedoras go?
Nice tip, Ivan, but you need to learn the difference between "setup," the noun/adjective form and "set up," the verb. Unfortunately you're not the only person who makes this mistake. Actually, they're aren't many who use it correctly anymore.
From one example above: " In a few steps you can setup [set up] your online and offline calendars..."
Both your examples in the opening paragraph should be two words.
Your use in number two is correct: "Download the setup tool..."
Hopefully others will learn as well.
Keep up the good tips!
Thanks! I never knew the difference indeed!
Unfortunately, this tool works only one way. Calaboration only syncs your Google Calendar with iCal, not the other way around. So if you have one, or several calendars already created in iCal with a ton of events, this app isn't going to pull your iCal events/calendars into Google's Calendar. So this is great if you've been using Google for your calendaring and want to bring them into iCal, but not so great the other way around.
Once you get all your events onto the Google Calendar, you can have all your events sync both ways, but getting them there is a battle if you already have a lot of events in iCal.
This is really frustrating that it's so difficult to truly sync calendars without spending money on a third-party app.
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True but, if you subscribe to your ical feed in gcal, you'll see all of your events and just click and add them to the gcalendar that you are creating. Still a nuisance but at least you don't have to re-enter every single one.
Although, I haven't tested it to see how accurately the ical alamrs, repeats, attendees, etc. translate to gcal.
Anthony
-Where did the fedoras go?
Unless you have MobileMe, publishing your calendar online is a pain, and for many people, simply doesn't work. For instance, I've tried publishing my iCal calendar on two different Web domains (both have WebDAV access) and neither of them works.
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Visit The Graphic Mac for graphics and Mac OS tips, reviews, tutorials and discussion.
I didn't realize that. I've had mobile me, so it has just worked. That's good to know for when I don't continue it next year.
Thanks,
Anthony
-Where did the fedoras go?
Yes, you will have to recreate your recurring events in the synced google calendars and trash the old iCal calendars to avoid duplication.
Getting your iCal events into gCal isn't very intuitive, but it is actually quite simple:
http://andrew.harrison.org/notes/ical-gcal-sync
andrew harrison
http://andrew.harrison.org
And that headline is sarcastic.
Just purchased BusySync the other day for this very feature.
You could actually do this all before this Google app was released, it was just much more manual labor.
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Visit The Graphic Mac for graphics and Mac OS tips, reviews, tutorials and discussion.
I'm really an end user at heart, though. Sometimes manual labor puts a chink in my workflow.
For $25 I'm not too bummed. All our (myself and my wife's) calendars sync and we can edit each others events, which is something I've wanted for a long time.
Vista-Cal is the thing people! It doesn't need to sink like these wanna-bes!
When are you people going to get some serious apps?
http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com
http://stevefakeballmer.wordpress.com/
I am not Steve Ballmer pretending not to be me!