I am a mac user and I am not ashamed to say it, I think few mac users would be. I am also a google user but who isn’t.
For several years I had been wanting to use iCal and gCal ubiquitously and could not. gCal only allowed viewing of the calendars. One day Plaxo released a little downloadable sync client that would sync iCal with PlaxoCal and then sync PlaxoCal with gCal for FREE. I found the link to this here. I should note that there were a couple non-free software offerings that would sync gCal with iCal, but I am weary of paying for stuff I can get for free.
The Plaxo sync worked pretty well. The most annoying things were a significant lag in syncing and you were only allowed one calendar per google account. “Thankfully” I had about 6 google accounts and therefore could spread out ownership of the various calendars. This worked well for a while especially after Plaxo released their newest version of their sync client. Things worked great for about six months or so until one day one of my accounts wouldn’t sync.
Since it had been a while I decided to do another google search for iCal-gCal solutions. And behold I find this link through a blog called SwissMiss. Leave it to google to call it something cute….Calaboration.
At first I thought the .zip file may have been spam but after some further looking around it turned out to be legitimate. I installed it and after an initial set of glitches and hickups I now have iCal-gCal love.
It’s not perfect on the iCal side, since it treats it as an editable calendar feed. Perhaps due to the spread out ownership my calendars look like this:
So far, this works. I like that I can easily force it to refresh/sync.
One drawback is that now that they are considered new calendars in iCal my color coding in my iPhone is all messed up and I need to do some strategic syncing in order to get the colors back in order. As you may know the iPhone automatically assigns a color to a particular calendar depending on the order in which that calendar appeared in the iPhone. According to TouchTip
“your first five calendars: red, orange, blue, green, and purple. Afterward, any more calendars are assigned a random color out of those five.”
Again, click here if you want google calaboration.
UPDATE:
I just found out, through use, that I am now unable to add an event on my iPhone and have it be assigned to one of the gCal calendars. It comes across and creates a new calender in iCal called “Calendar” and I am unable to edit the event’s calendar to any of the gCal calendars. I may need to revert back to my Plaxo usage if I don’t find an effective way around this. If I cannot find a good way around this, this lack of functionality, since I doubt it is a bug, is deffinately significant enough to render this “calaboration” thing useless.
I added a new “Edit” button.
After touching the Edit button, the circles on the right show up.
Selecting an individual calendar temporarily displays the check mark before moving on to the next screen.
In this screen, there is the name of the calendar, a “Done” button, a “Display with All” toggle, and a color selection bar. The “Display with All” toggle will include the individual calendar when viewing all calendars when the toggle is set to “On”. Setting this toggle to “Off” means that this individual calendar is only available in the individual view mode. At first, the current color is designated by a circle. The circle shows more clearly on the iPhone.
After selecting the new desired color the selection circle will move to the designated color. The user will then touch the “Done” button to be brought back through the menu.
