Sync Google Calendars with iCal (and iPhone or iPod Touch)
Question: What’s the best way to use Google Calendar with iCal and an iPhone?
Simply subscribing to Google Calendars from iCal easily: see How to Subscribe to a Google Calendar using iCal.
However, if you want to sync bidirectionally — add things to iCal and have those sync to Google Calendar as well — I recommend Spanning Sync, which has a 30 day trial and costs only $15 to purchase. While there are actually free ways to subscribe from iCal to Google Calendar, it’s more trouble than it’s worth and doesn’t have the flexibility or simplicity of Spanning Sync.
What makes Google Calendar so great in the first place? Check out So long iCal, hello Google Calendar. To quote one section:
“Google Calendar’s ‘Quick Add’ takes the chore out of adding an event to my schedule… I can hit the letter ‘q’ to open a small dialog box into which I can type an event name, time and date almost as if I were telling someone about it in an email: ‘dinner with Jessi 6 pm 4/22′ adds the event right where it should go. As icing on the Quick Add cake, date spanning works too: ‘Half Life 2 Therapy Camp April 22-24′ creates an event that spans properly. No obnoxious tabbing around to set dates and times right, and no mousing to drag little event boxes.”
Lastly, when using the iPhone, simply point Safari to “google.com/m”
(notice the “m” for “mobile”) to get the mobile version of Google Search, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Reader, Google Docs, Google News, etc. I bookmarked the site and added it to my iPhone’s homescren. These mobile versions are much faster than loading the full versions from the iPhone.
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You can’t copy and paste on an iphone, so the article you recommend isn’t all that helpful for the iphone…do you know how to subscribe to google calendar via ical WITHOUT copying and pasting?
It’s true you can’t copy and paste on the iPhone: the iPhone 2.0 firmware will allow copying and pasting, so that feature is coming.
But copying and pasting is not necessary in order to implement synching between iCal and Google Calendar(s). If you follow the step by step instructions, they actually require that you do this with iCal on your Mac, not on the iPhone — perhaps I hadn’t made that clear, so thanks for pointing that out!
Once you setup syncing on your Mac between iCal and Google Calendar, any appointments you create in iCal — on the Mac — will sync to your iPhone (but only after you sync it with your Mac) and with Google Calendar. Similarly, anything you add to Google Calendar will sync to iCal, and thus to your iPhone (but again, only after a sync with your Mac).
Thanks for your comments!
Regards,
-Mr. Tech