Sync Google Calendar & iCal

bordalix — Mon, 06 Nov 2006 11:40:00 -0500

In a few days, a great tool will born: Spanning Sync. It allows a full syncronization between Google Calendar & iCal. Watch the screencast by clicking the picture below:

Calendar war is over

bordalix — Thu, 09 Feb 2006 11:12:00 -0500

30 boxes debuted 4 days ago, and it rockz! Finally found my calendar service, thank you guys:

Add new events through a command line (brilliant);
Eficient Ajax powered interface, working in all browsers;
Tag enabled events;
Shared events, even with people outside 30boxes;
Full integration with iCal and Outlook;
Javascript/HTML badge to include a snippet of your calendar in other web sites;
Will have an API soon.

Ahhhh, and it's free.

Shared calendar

bordalix — Mon, 28 Nov 2005 10:02:00 -0500

I'm a Mac user at home, and a Windows user at work. I have my mail on a IMAP server, so I can read it in either systems without any frills. In the iMac I use Mail.app, and in the Windows box I use Thunderbird, and everything works fine. But I have a problem with my calendar. I love the iCal design, and I would like to have it in my Windows box. Not only for scheduling meetings, but also for ToDo management, sharing and publishing other calendars. I went to the web and to all the sites with "web application lists" on it, but didn't find any real good web calendar application: I tryied Planzo.com, but has a polluted user interface, and Kiko.com, which don't work in Safari, so I had to improvise.

After some googling, I found Yagoon, and if you take a minute to jump to their site, you will notice the resemblance with Apple iCal. For 30 bucks, this could be my best buy of the year, but wait, I can try it for 60 days, so it seems is going to be my best buy for next year. Ok, I have my iCal look-a-like in my Windows box. Now, how can I sincronize the two applications?

So, I went to .Mac pages for prices and conditions, but 99 dollars per year seems to much for a WebDAV server. Back to Google, I found iCalExchange, which is a free service for sharing iCal files. Ok, so now I have my "synchronizer". I tryied to publish and subscribe the same calendar from iCal and Yagoon, but I got a lot of permission errors, so I had to go for a two calendar solution.

I created two calendars on iCalExchange, named bonnie and clyde. iCal publishes (writes) in the bonnie calendar, and subscribes (reads) the clyde calendar. In the iCal, bonnie is coloured green and clyde is coloured red. This way, I know that I can change, erase or create green events, but I should not do nothing to the red ones. On the Yagoon side, it publishes to the clyde calendar (green) and subscribes the bonnie calendar (red), implementing the same colour code.

At the end, I can use two different applications in two different operating systems, having the same user interface and full syncronization (it even syncronizes ToDos). All for less than 30 dollars, and thanks to iCalExchange. Ahhh, and I can see my calendar live going directly to iCalExchange homepage. Rui, feel free to use this to write a new HOWTO for your blog ;)

The place João Bordalo calls home: Tag calendar

Sync Google Calendar & iCal

Calendar war is over

Shared calendar