iCal and Google Calendar Together At Last

[Vincent Ferrari]

<div class='os_post_top_link'><a href='http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/12/google-calendar-now-supports-apple-ical.html' target='_blank'>http://googlemac.blogspot.com/2008/...apple-ical.html</a><br /><br /></div><p><em>"The Google Calendar team is proud to announce the public release of our support for the CalDAV protocol. You can now use Apple iCal with your Google Calendar, so you can work even when you're offline, sync almost instantly, respond to invitations from others and see the free/busy data of your friends and coworkers."</em></p><p><img src="http://images.thoughtsmedia.com//at/auto/1228223883.usr18053.png" /></p><p>Now that's pretty cool, and on top of it, Google even has Calaboration, an iCal configuration tool, available just to make things go a little smoother during your setup.&nbsp; If you're one of those "everything in the cloud" types, this isn't a bad application and to top it all off, it's free!</p>

[Joe Johaneman]

I have a sync solution for iCal and Google Calendar (GSync), but since it's no longer developed, it's nice to know this is available as an option. Thanks for the heads up!

[doogald]

I use Spanning Sync myself - I bought a lifetime license last year - and they actually have a bog post explaining why their solution may be better. See http://blog.spanningsync.com/2008/12/how-does-google-caldav-compare-to-spanning-sync.html

If you have an iPhone, I think that the key point is:

Calendars synchronized using CalDAV become read-only on iPhone. One of our customers recently rolled out 700 iPhones and 200 iPod touches. This lack of iPhone compatibility makes Google's CalDAV solution a non-starter for them, and for anyone else looking for bidirectional sync between iPhone and Google Calendar.

Calendars synchronized with Spanning Sync are editable on Google Calendar, iCal, and the iPhone calendar, and changes made in any of those places will show up on all three (after syncing your iPhone using iTunes).

I think that the same would be true for the other solution, BusySync.

If anybody wants to buy Spanning Sync, by the way, I can save you $5. Use my code: http://spanningsync.com/?r=HBFCFB

[Deslock]

Over the Summer, I tried the CalDAV approach (it was in beta) and found it to be too limited for editing or moving items between calendars. I ended up getting BusySync (it's well worth the $25).

I considered Spanning Sync, but at $65, it wasn't worth the extra cost to me for the Address Book syncing (which iTunes has anyway, though presumably Spanning Sync is more capable).