I want a calendar that I can edit on my iphone AND on my home computer AND have one of my co-workers edit on their computer, and they all sync up automatically without me having to remember to plug my iphone in. This post explains how to set it up so that your iPhone calendar and iPhone are automatically synced up all the time via Google calendar.
MobileMe doesn’t achieve this. iCal shared calendars via itunes doesn’t achieve this. After much experimenting I found the best way is through Google calendar.
Google calendar allows editing and viewing from iCal on your mac and from your iPhone, plus you can let anyone else edit your calendar if you want them to. So Google calendar becomes the hub. Here’s how it all works:
STEP 1. GET A GOOGLE CALENDAR ACCOUNT.
You can set up a new calendar in Google at http://google.com/calendar
STEP 2. SYNC ICAL WITH GOOGLE.
Google has released a program called calaboration that will automatically put all the settings for your Google calendar into iCal. Download and run calaboration. It looks like this, you just select the calendars you want to add into your iCal account.
STEP 3. SYNC IPHONE WITH GOOGLE
If you have iphone version 3 you can just use the built in CalDAV to access your Google Calendar. Go to Settings then Mail, Contacts, Calendars then Add Account then Other then Add CalDAV Account.
You’ll see a page like this:
Enter the settings for your google account here and that’s it!
NOTE – More than 1 Calendar.
If you have more than one Google Calendar you’d like to sync, you need to copy the URL of the calendar from ical across to your iphone. To do this, AFTER you have used callaboration to put the google settings into ical, go into ical, preferences, Accounts, Server Settings – it looks like this.
You need to type that URL into the ‘Advanced Settings’ – ‘Account URL’ of the Calendar on your iphone. It’s quite a long text so the easiest way is to copy it from ical into mail, mail it to your iphone, copy it out of mail and paste it in.
NOTE 2: Old iphone software.
If you have iphone software version 2 you’ll need to use Nuevasync. You set it up in your iPhone as a Microsoft Exchange server that points to Nuevasync. You can sync directly from google to iphone but all the calendars come across as one calendar. To choose which colors the calendars are on the iphone, you need to enable them one at a time from neuvasync, checking the iphone calendar each time, and they will import into the iphone in order of the following colors: red (first calendar) , orange (2nd) , blue, green then purple. eg the first calendar you enable will be red, and so on.
Hey there, surfing the internet I found another quick, solid and above all cheap solution. It’s an app, called remote calendar. What made me finally choose for this app was that it can sync a variety of calendars with my iphone on the basis of CalDAV. Me and my girlfirend are using ical, while in office we are using outlook. Moreover, some frineds and me are using google for a music project. With remote calendar I have it all in sync. You should look out for it in the app store.I ike the app, because it is an all-in-one-solution.
Reads like an advert Peter Pan….. If thats what it is, you should be a little more tansparent don’t you think…. After much searching, the blog here seems to provide the only workable solution that users are finding to solve the syncing from different sources problem..
[...] but it used to be a little confusing to set up on a mac. (See this post on what a mess it was and this post for Google’s old work-around – you’ll still need to do it the old way I think if [...]
WIll iCal tasks also sync in the same way?
Hello,
very nice description. BUT google does not support calaboration. So it does not work any more. They seem to explain how to do it but not really easy if English is not your first language.
Daniel
this was how I had my and my husbands calendars for the last 4 years or so and it worked beutifully. Until last week. Our appointments for the following 3 weeks disappeared. ALL OF THEM. Ones I made on my Mac, ones I made on my iPhone 3gs, ones my husband made on his iPhone 4, ones I made on my work laptop, repeating events, dragged and dropped events, single events, etc. I can only assume it’s Google calendar and searchign through Google help I see that this isn’t as uncommon as one would think. I loved the way it worked for us – until it inexplicably stopped working. I can’t have a calendar that randomly deletes appointments. Unfortunatley, when I try to find an alternative, everyone keeps suggesting what I already have. Sigh.
Ann, am also having this problem, as are others. This is a known issue. See http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Calendar/thread?tid=6791daf5ef644ebf&hl=en
My primary gripe with Google calendar is that I wonder who at Google is reading my calendar. How can there be any privacy, security with a web based calendar? This is the advantage of iCal or any calendar app that’s based on your own hard drive. Ideally you could sync it with your smartphone, but jesus christ when does this “i want i want it want” shit end?
No matter what newfangled gimmick is introduced, we always want MORE. Just awful.
Think I’ll just print out a weekly format of Google calendar, use a hi-lighter and outline all my appointments. Put in a ‘to-do’ list along the top too. Problem solved, the luddite way no less. LOL
After trying various online “fixes” to get iCal to pick up appt’s that I put in my iPhone, I still have yet to find one that works. The most common recommendation is to back-up iCal, then delete everything, restore it from the backup and then replace calendar info on the iPhone with that from iCal. This hasn’t worked.
Does anyone have a suggestion? Seems like this has been an issue for years…