Keep iCal and GCal in Sync For Free

Posted by Jacob Schulman on 08/4/08 in Featured, Tips & Tricks, Tutorial, Web

The blogs have been buzzing as of late about Google’s introduction of the CalDAV protocol into its Google Calendar service. For those of who who live on the planet Jupiter, Google Calendar is the excellent free online calendar service that resides in the cloud. One of the major trends in technology is maintaining a connection between apps in the cloud, and apps on your physical machine. With the introduction of CalDAV to Google Calendar, it’s never been easier to keep iCal and Google Calendar in sync, let alone for free.

For the people that don’t feel like shelling out for Apple’s push-enabled MobileMe service, Google offers a highly competitive set of services that rival Apple’s. For the low price of $0.00, you can have all of your iCal appointments synced up to the cloud. Additionally, any changes you make to Google Calendar online will be pushed down to your iCal calendar on your Mac. While it doesn’t offer the same instantaneous changes as MobileMe claims to offer, the 15 minute interval default sync time should be more than enough for some.

Integrating Google Calendar with iCal is as simple as adding an account to your iCal preferences. After you open the preferences in iCal, click on the Accounts tab. Hit the “+” button to get the “Add an Account” dialog box. For the username option, put in your full Gmail address (including the @gmail.com), followed by your password. Additionally, you have to put in the address for the Account URL. This address can be found here: https://www.google.com/calendar/dav/[YOUR USERNAME]/user (just replace the [YOUR USERNAME] with your own Gmail address). Again, this should include the “@gmail.com” at the end of it.

After following those simple steps, you should be up and running. You can sync manually by clicking Command+R and you can also change the sync interval. With the iPhone Google interface, and Google Sync app for BlackBerry, you can truly have your calendars in sync everywhere. I have a strong feeling that Apple will allow native syncing to the iPhone with a future update. That would make it even easier to make sure that you never have a reason for missing an appointment again.

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11 Comment(s)

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Dermah said on

August 4th, 2008 at 6:57 am

This doesn’t work nearly as well as I had hoped. It only syncs once calendar and it’s not an existing calendar, you have to put events in from scratch. Or am I missing a setting?

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Ash said on

August 4th, 2008 at 8:38 am

Yes I agree with the previous post. Does anyone know how to sync multiple Google Calendars?
Thank you.

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Don said on

August 4th, 2008 at 9:04 am

I’ll stick with BusySync - http://www.busymac.com. It’s been fast and reliable for me. Does multiple calendars, LAN and costs less than SpanningSync.

Tim Madel said on

August 4th, 2008 at 11:29 am

You can sync multiple calendars. Here’s a link to how-to:

http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358

The problem is there is a know issue where your default calendar won’t sync both ways (only from iCal to Google calendar). Google says this is an Apple problem so it may not be fixed anytime soon (then people wouldn’t use Mobileme).

Harish Mallipeddi said on

August 4th, 2008 at 12:04 pm

Btw Calgoo Connect is free now. It can sync multiple calendars both ways and it has been working great for me.

http://www.calgoo.com

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Jonathan M said on

August 4th, 2008 at 3:59 pm

Syncing multiple calendars is really easy. Just add each calendar as a separate account. It works perfectly.

There’s full instructions at:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358

Look at the bottom section entitled “Add secondary calendars”

Dermah - You can use existing calendars perfectly easily, no need to have to make a new calendar.

Another feature you don’t mention here is that now your calendars are in iCal, you can use iSync to update them to your mobile phone. I haven’t tried syncing back from my phone to the calendar but frankly I would never do that anyway.

Jon

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Florentin said on

August 4th, 2008 at 8:53 pm

This is for Leopard only

Jake said on

August 4th, 2008 at 10:32 pm

Not very useful until multiple calendars can be sync on one account. I don’t like anymore clutter than necessary in ical.

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Jeff said on

August 5th, 2008 at 2:45 pm

Jake said:

Not very useful until multiple calendars can be sync on one account. I don’t like anymore clutter than necessary in ical.

—
Jonathan M said:

Syncing multiple calendars is really easy. Just add each calendar as a separate account. It works perfectly.

There’s full instructions at:
http://www.google.com/support/calendar/bin/answer.py?answer=99358

Look at the bottom section entitled “Add secondary calendars”

—

Jake, I just tried this and it works fine! I have 3 calendars from my Google account in iCal, plus my wife’s account (which I have permissions to access).

- Jeff

Chris said on

August 5th, 2008 at 4:37 pm

It is a nice thing if you want to manage a public calendar over google and iCal but for everything else it is useless.

www.esturismo.eu said on

August 28th, 2008 at 4:27 pm

Thanks for the tip! i like it and i will activate it right now!