Calendar Syncing
I have a lot going on. My wife has a lot going on. Our son, although only 3, has as much, if not more, going on. A calendar helps keep up with all that we have going on. However, when your calendar is spread across 3 different places, it hurts more than it helps.
Until recently, I basically used iCal to keep up with what I had going on. On occasion, I found myself setting up events via Gmail, which would add them to my Google Calendar (gCal). To top it all off, I have been using a Palm TX recently, and randomly adding calendar items to it. My calendar was a fragmented mess. I needed a way to sync all three locations so that they would be…well, in sync.
I decided to start with Google Calendar. I created multiple calendars (me, the wife, my son, etc). I moved all of our events out of my iCal and onto gCal. This didn’t take as long as I thought it would since I had sort of been double-submitting events in the past week or so. Besides, we rarely have any solid plans more than a month out, except for holidays and travel.
Once I had all my calendar items on gCal, I deleted everything out of iCal. To keep iCal in sync with gCal, I decided to subscribe to all of my gCal calendars in iCal. I set them to update weekly, so now I can keep my master calendar on gCal, which I can access from anywhere, and it will always sync with my iCal, either manually or automatically once a week.
Once I had my calendar subscriptions set up, I was able to sync those same events to my Palm. Voila! Now I have a central calendar that I can access from anywhere, that syncs automatically with my laptop, and eventually to my Palm.
January 4th, 2007
Events created on the palm will sync with iCal, but how do you get those up to gCal? iCal won’t let you subscribe your palm calendar. Ideas?
January 5th, 2007
I think that iCal is supposed to have a feature similar to this in Leopard. There is also a product in beta right now called SpanningSync (http://blog.spanningsync.com/) that will facilitate this as well.