Keep iCal and GCal in Sync For Free


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.